Regional IT Press: Create Can't Sponsor

Played with a comma in the title? Well, somehow this is the case. Now let’s figure out to whom and why it is needed at all, who and what has already been done, and where to move on. Bigger at the end.

There is a regional IT press, even if we exclude projects aimed at a mass audience. Although not every million-plus city can boast of having at least a blogger regularly covering industry events, and nothing can be said about publications with an intelligible content model and an established audience.

Let's see those projects that work specifically for a local professional party. I use my base and knowledge, maybe I forgot someone, I will be glad if you add it. I move from east to west.

From Primorye to Krasnoyarsk, everything is completely depressing. I didn’t find anything.

Krasnoyarsk -http://losin.ru/ - personal blog of Ivan Losin. It has long and regularly covered the news of the local web development market, almost daily updates. Occasionally affects local telecom news.
Barnaul - http://22ru.ru / - project of Ivan Dvazhenogo. New site building in Altai, sometimes a little bit about profile events.
Novosibirsk - www.bonin.ru - project of Anton Spiridonov. Almost daily updates about web projects, often about events, sometimes rumors, scandals, intrigues and investigations of the Novosibirsk web.
Ekaterinburg - http://it-eburg.com- This is my project. I won’t say much about myself - but we write not only about new sites, but also about startups, integration and telecom, and only for professional parties.
Izhevsk - http://izh-it.ru/ - a wonderful project of Natalia Bryzgalova, which builds a vibrant and active community of Izhevsk web developers. True, Natalya practically does not go beyond the problems of creating sites.
Perm - http://itibus.ru / is a rather young project by Olga Suslova, and perhaps the youngest among those presented. In addition to Perm IT news, he often publishes materials from other sites. Estb where to grow, in my opinion.
Samara - http://samara-tech.ru- The project of the Samara web studio Vivatika. Vacuuming everything that relates at least somehow to IT in Samara - from new tenders to new tariffs for cable television. It turns out a little vinaigrette similar to cnews, but with a Samara accent.
Rostov-on-Don - http://www.technodrive.ru - this is probably one of the oldest regional IT portals. Variations on the theme of regional Cnews - here are new gadgets, and about the local department "K", etc.
Taganrog - http://thinkit.ru/- The project of oCube Studio is one of the most visited regional IT portals. In addition to computer news, it contains price lists of local computer stores, information about providers, a catalog of sites, etc. - these are usually not what these portals do in larger cities, but they don’t forget about local IT pros.
Voronezh - http://voronezh.in/ is an excellent project, it also mainly lives on the news of web development. There are interviews with local experts (occasionally), reference services.
Kaliningrad - http://itkaliningrad.ru/ - it’s also about the local IT market, but there is almost no Kaliningrad news and almost finished with its own content. Long doubted whether to include him in the list.

It is very sad that there are not at least the most simple projects in Tomsk, Omsk, Chelyabinsk, Kazan, Nizhny Novgorod, Volgograd and Krasnodar, well, or it's hard to find. Kazan, with its ambitions, is generally unforgivable, and Novosibirsk, sorry, bonin.ru alone is clearly not enough - the IT market is much richer there.

The list seems to be quite large, but the situation is sad. I often communicate with PR managers of federal companies who need objects of influence in the regions — they agree with me — it’s empty on the ground. This is bad - the press serves as a bonding link in the local community, helps to build connections, talk about new things that are significant here and now, build concrete partnerships, and learn about what they did on the next street. This is sometimes harder than finding out about Silicon Valley news. Yes, it is now very easy to share information through social networks, but this is from time to time. And the industry press creates a service with all the parameters of this service itself - that is, regularly and, whenever possible, qualitatively informs participants about what is happening. I believe, it is a necessary element in creating the very “nutrient broth" from which new projects grow. But we understand that the more professional communication, the greater the exhaust, and this is good for everyone. IT companies themselves are often too lazy to even post news on their own website, not to inform their colleagues. This is my separate headache.

In addition, the IT publication has another important role - translates from Russian into intelligible. The news found and processed by the profile site then diverges to other publications creating the necessary PR effect among the masses, popularizes the industry, products and technologies, etc. This has already been verified more than once.

Why isn't the IT press spawning? There are several reasons for this.

No one to create- A professional in IT will be engaged in such a project only out of love for art - in his main profession he will always earn more. Journalists in the IT business have little understanding, and often are also afraid of it because of the specific terminology that serves as a threshold for entry. Even in Yekaterinburg, with its fairly well-developed media market, of journalists who understand the IT business ... well, 5 can. In other cities, pen workers that distinguish CMS from CRM cannot be detected at all.
Nothing to live for- The IT portal in a single city, and even aimed at a narrow layer of IT managers, is extremely difficult to monetize. No one is interested in being advertised on it - the audience is too small, and we do not have sponsorship tools for such projects. IT companies do not know how to pay, and bloggers or journalists who could create a local Techcranch do not know how to search, borrow and manage money.

For me, the absolute truth is that a local IT press is needed. Otherwise I wouldn’t do it myself. I was lucky, I found my niche and see growth directions, although I understand that no such project will have $ 200 thousand per month, like Arrington two years after the creation of Tech Crunch.

This was information for consideration. Now it remains to decide whether the IT press is really needed, if so, how much, and if so, how to create it.

Puzomerka

Mini-rating on the number of subscribers in Google.Reader

For comparison:
Roem.ru -1651
webplanet.ru - 251
Cmsmagazine.ru - 125
startuppoint.ru - 125

• bonin.ru - 176
• it-eburg.com - 113 (another 197 on rss livejournal)
• losin.ru - 95
• thinkit.ru - 68
• samara-tech.ru - 34
• izh-it.ru - 27
• voronezh.in - 18
• 22ru.ru - 17
• itibus.ru -1

PS I add projects from the comments:
Khabarovsk - http://dvblog.ru/ - Far Eastern Habrahabrik
Kemerovo - http://42web.ru/ - Ilya Gorbarov’s project. According to the author himself, he was haunted by the laurels of Bonin.ru :) of
Khabarovsk