Update: See October coverage from Newsweek and N.J. Monthly.

When the media history books (ha, I mean, media history e-reader files) look back at the beginnings of online hyperlocal news, there will be a clear battlegrounds.

New Jersey.

Gannet has gone big in the Garden State with its InJersey collective, and the New York Times first dabbled in town-specific news with Maplewood. Baristanet, the gray old lady of hyperlocal news, calls Montclair, in Essex County, home, and, while it has pushed into Connecticut and onto Long Island, AOL’s Patch network got its roots in the Jerz.

The reasons why, of course, are pretty clear.

Here are some obvious motivations:

• Proximity to New York City media capital — Yeah, yeah, yeah, NYC is inevitably the media capital of the country, so it helps to be just over a bridge or through a tunnel from where the big execs with deep pockets have their offices.
• Suburbanized — Unlike the elitist, diverse communities of New York or otherwise statistically odd urban communities that other media experiments are often based, New Jersey is a fine place to test virtues and practices that could be exported throughout the country.
• Densely populated — Lots of people in localized communities mean hyperlocal flagships have the chance for lots of unique visitors.
• Wealthy — The chance for valuable advertising in the wealthy pockets of North Jersey surely wasn’t lost.
• Home to media executives, journalists and others — Particularly outside of NYC, the educated, media crowd was already there to be used or develop on their own these products. Yes, the big execs with deep pockets may have offices in NYC but they probably drive to enclosed
• Proximity to large Philadelphia media market — Gannet has opened some of its hyperlocals outside Philadelphia, like inCollingswood. It helps that as the NYC market wanes in the central part of the state, the country’s fourth largest market picks up, meaning the market can keep expanding.

Are there other reasons that make sense? Does this mean anything for New Jersey or the eventual development of hyperlocal news?

*Updated @ 9:36 a.m. 12/23/09 **Much thanks to Jess Durkin for others.

I don’t think anyone’s arguing that a big portion of the future of news will be this hyperlocal movement that continues to dominate the conversation and has grown in focus for many years.

So, I’m surprised to say I haven’t been able to find is a comprehensive list of already existing products. This isn’t going to be that list, but let’s give it a start. Help me highlight the existing, active hyperlocal news sites worth following.

Read my definition of What is hyperlocal news?

These lists will certainly continue to be updated.

See more beginning on Page 126 of this CUNY PDF. More than 300 hyperlocal news sites from the United Kingdom, I’m told, are listed here.

ONLINE-ONLY HYPERLOCAL NEWS PRODUCTS

1. Baristanet — Monmounth County, Montclair*, N.J. is home to the grand old lady of profitable hyperlocal news sites.
2. The Batavian (Batavia and Genesee County) — I dig the work of Howard Owens and his work as a one-man advertising and editorial team.
3. **Corona del Mar Today (Corona Del Mar, California)
4. The Rapadian (Grand Rapids, Michigan) — They’re heavily interested in citizen reporting, it seems.
5. Dulles District (Loudon County, Virginia) –
6. Edhat (Santa Barbara, Calif.)
7. Grafton Times (Grafton, Mass.) –
8. Hometown Headlines (Rome, Georgia) — Look at those advertisements lining its sidebar from small businesses.
9. City of Hopkinsville (Hopkinsville, Ky.) — This bridges the gap between government and content, but they’re filling a role likely not handled in the past.
10. Kansas City Kansan (Wyandotte County, Kansas) — H/T Howard Owens
11. The Local — Kudos to the N.Y. Times (and CUNY) for experimenting here ahead and more successfully than other metro dailies. Thus far, they have a site for neighborhoods in Brooklyn and one for the Maplewood, Millburn and South Orange cities in northern New Jersey
12. MyBallard (Ballard, Seattle, Wash.)
13. NEast Philly (Northeast Philadelphia) — It ain’t self-sustaining yet — full disclosure, I contribute and handle its Web presence — but I’m really proud of the steps we’re making.
14. Newz Junky (Watertown, N.Y.) — It’s all aggregation, but someone built a profitable arm around a site that collects from a broad and big media region and squeezes down just the most relevant stories for its readers.
15. New Haven Independent (New Haven, Conn.)*
16. Oakland Local (Oakland, Calif.)
17. Patch Network (North Jersey, Connecticut and New York) — The town-specific franchise now owned by AOL.
18. Sacramento Press (Sacramento, Calif.) With a staff of 17, it’s quickly developing a buzz around a multi-tiered revenue platform.
19. Universal Hub (Boston) Largely agggregation
20. Village Soup (Tennessee communities)
21. WestportNow.com (Westport, Conn.) — Founded as far back as 2003.
22. West Seattle Blog (Seattle, Wash.) — Four years old and eight million page views in 2009, they tell me.
23. Your Hub (Denver metro) — Town-specific content for Metro Denver.
24. Your Local (Boston area) — Town-specific content fed onto the Boston Globe Web site.

ONLINE-ONLY LOCAL, TOPICAL NEWS PRODUCTS

1. Keystone Edge (Pennsylvania) — Covering the new economies of the state. I won’t post all of Issue Media Group sites, the corporation that publishes Keystone.
2. Loaded Gun (Boston) — Covering films being shot in Beantown.
   
3. Metropolis (Philadelphia) — Commentary-centered metro coverage.
4. Technically Philly (Philadelphia) — Covering the community of people who use technology — full disclosure, I co-founded this site.
5. The UpTake (Minnesota) — The localized politics site has developed a reputation.

Networked lists some more here.

ONLINE-ONLY LOCAL NEWS PRODUCTS

In these early years of hyperlocal news, any geographically-centered online journalism project is often given the name hyperlocal. But citywide projects that replace previous coverage areas aren’t anything but Web versions of local news. Still, they’re a big part of the conversation.

1. Ann Arbor Chronicle — as profiled by the Nieman Jouralism Lab — and Arbor Web and the Ann Arbor News, the latter of which is a print newspaper recast as a Web-only news source, are the forefront of local news in the first “good-sized U.S. city” without a *daily print newspaper, according to  an interesting story from Time magazine.
2. Baktopia is an online community for young people in Bakersfield as set up by the innovative Bakersfield Voice, though it may be getting the heave-ho.
3. *Berks County TV (Reading, Pa.) –
4. *Chattarati (Chattanooga, Tenn.) — News and opinion
5. ChiTown DailyNews — Chicago’s online-only news beast made news when it announced plans to shift from nonprofit to a profit model.
6. MinnPost — The standard nonprofit donation model around local news.
7. Neighborhood Notes — While NN is among the most innovative of these and certainly the most targeted, because it covers the city of Portland, to me, this is still local news today. Its method of offering readers the chance to read news about only their neighborhood or part of the city shows a hyperlocal element, this is simply a more progressive local news product than a genuinely hyperlocal animal, I think.
8. Seattle PostGlobe — The online-only product launched by staffers let go when the Seattle Post-Intelligencer ditched the printed word.
9. Voice of San Diego — Their membership model is often discussed but rarely replicated and benefited by a focus on government.

There’s also the Breaking News aggregation of Twitter feeds from some users in certain cities. The Bakersfield Voice has been noted for its use of the Web and user-generated content, but it has a print edition.’

OK, I’m sure I’ve missed many, many existing, sustainable, online-only local news brands. What are they?