Citizen journalism based news portal Merinews.com has launched Local, a new section that will feature local news, events and listings. The company has started the initiative by launching a section specific to Gurgaon and plans to launch eight more city pages. According to the company, local pages are not only about news reports but also serves a lot of other relevant information like events, directory listings, thereby broadening the horizon of our revenue streams.

“As online business has picked up quite strongly since the time Merinews was launched in 2006. However, most of them were restricted to one vertical and served unidirectional information or news. We already had reasonable strength of citizens writing from different cities in India about different issues. So we found a business sense in leveraging the existing community and giving a more prominent shape to their reporting,” Sudipta Sengupta, general manager, product and alliance, Merinews, has told AlooTechie.

The sections will continue to be modelled on the content that comes in from the citizen journalists but the company had recently strengthened their editorial team but haven’t set aside a team separately for Gurgaon edition.

Speaking about how this initiative would help in adding the company’s revenues, Sengupta said, “Local advertisers who may have had the opportunity till now restricted to a few vertical sites will now find a horizontal platform to push sell their product to relevant audience. So, I intend to find a lot of local advertisers catering to local audience. And having a local audience ensures that we plug in other revenue streams (e-commerce, coupons, deals etc.) and create more revenue streams.” Merinews expects to do $10 million to $12 million over a period of 18 months period, but, according to Sengupta, the key to this would be how fast the company is able to implement the plans.