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How Local Can Hyperlocal Get?

Have a look at any of the more popular journalism jobs listings, and odds are, on any given day, you'll see a lot of listings for jobs at AOL's hyperlocal machine, Patch, spreading across the country like a stubborn weed.

Now comes news from the Washington Post that they're going to get all up in Patch's grill when it comes to putting the hyper in hyperlocal.  Subdivisions, baby! According to Erik Wemple, writing on DC hyperlocal TBD:

According to a Post source, this new crop of sites would be even more hyperlocal than the Patch sites that are now spreading around the region. The mission of the Patch sites is to dig deep on municipal news, including school board meetings, high school sports, trash collection, and the like.

The new Post initiative, says a source, would carve things up even more "micro" than the Patch sites, as in subdivision by subdivision. It's not clear at this point just how the Post would accomplish such a feat given the content needs of such an approach. Managers at the paper, according to the source, have held "hundreds" of meetings on this initiative.

So if we follow this line of thinking a few years along, we could find ourselves talking to the neighbors about what we'd just read on Patch:  The Johnsons at 313 Elm Street, or Patch:  Basement Apartment (Back).  Is this ultimately a cost-saving measure?  Huge media companies will task all of us to live blog our own lives and then provide them the content which they will turn around, complete with ads, and sell back to us?

Damn.  That sounds like it could seriously work.  Forget I said anything.  I've gotta run.