This is your moment - particularly you guys in Thanet who have got your pre-cooked network in place already, all you’ve got to do is plug it in and hit the throttle. Look around you: the local press is in disarray, local television news is next to non-existent, local and community radio are shams and are costing so much that they threaten to pull the entire regional publishing industry over.

Fuel prices are climbing again. The economy is sinking. The market is looking for new and more cost-effective ways to get its message across. The property crash puts up to a quarter of the total revenue of the local press at risk. What does this mean? It means local and hyperlocal and it means you.
It means networked hyperlocal news and networked hyperlocal classified. Ebay? Does anybody really want to drive to Cheltenham to pick up a set of Land Rover wheels when diesel is stuck at more than £1.20 a litre? It means networked hyperlocal property advertising offered at a fraction of the cost of rightmove.co.uk or primelocation.com. Kenthome.co.uk? Sorry, but I don’t want to have to plough through a site filled with houses in Medway when I’m looking for a period wreck in the Weald. I want a simple keyword search and geotagging to serve up my property ads in, say, Plaxtol, not a series of infuriating drop-downs.

As Jeff Jarvis constantly preaches, the link economy is killing the old content model. The ‘modern’ face of the local press is the content model in microcosm - a couple of static websites served with content from a series of ailing local papers. Want real news for Wye? Your choice is either a desk-bound trainee reporter in Ashford (seven miles away) who calls the cops a couple of times a day and no longer has the time to attend parish council meetings or these guys. Want to know what’s going on in Birchington? Or Newington? Or Borough Green? Or Otford? Or maybe an uncorrupted view of how your county is being run?

The last refuge of the local press is the place down the road. If I live in Wye and want news from Chilham, then I still rely on the local paper to serve it up. But get your network together and you smoke them out of that hole, too. All you’ve got to do is continue to do what you do best and link to the rest.

Look at wyeweb.org - a village of 2,000 people and yet at least five people regularly produce local content. I doubt there are even five full-time reporters working on the local paper which serves the needs of 150,000 people. How many people across your county are there just waiting to be pointed in the right direction and let loose on the hyperlocal link-based newswire?

This really is your chance. When do you start?