ReachLocal is paying $8.491 million in cash and stock for SMB Live, the online reputation manager for small- and medium-sized businesses it bought in late February. Terms of the deal were not released when the deal was announced, but the purchase price was disclosed in a filing ReachLocal made with…

Take two significant announcements of the day. Mix. And let’s see what we get. The first I’d call New York Times (NYSE: NYT) Local 2.0. Scott Heekin-Canady, president of the New York Times Media Group, told the FT that the Times may take its local edition push into 10-15 cities…

EveryBlock—the MSNBC Interactive-owned hyperlocal aggregator—is bulking up its site with data from SeeClickFix, a startup that lets anybody report an issue in need of government action in their community. The two companies—which are both considered to be among the top innovators in the local space online—will announce their partnership later…

58.com, a Chinese classified ad site, has raised $15 million in a round of funding. 58.com—which is currently in 320 cities in China and has more than 20 million registered users—says it will use the new cash to expand in “second- and third-tier cities” according to a brief by China-focused…

Google (NSDQ: GOOG) is renewing its push for the ad dollars of local businesses with an overhaul of its Local Business Center, which it is now calling Google Places. Via the Local Business Center, businesses have for more than eight months now been able to edit websites—called “Place Pages”—which Google…

Barely six months after raising $30 million in funding, social deal-finding site Groupon has received a huge $135 million add on from previous backer DST, the Russian investment group. Also participating in the round was Battery Ventures, which is new to Groupon. Part of the proceeds will go towards promoting…

The Huffington Post is continuing to broaden its horizons beyond news and political opinion with two new verticals this month. The first, launching today, is HuffPost Food. Later this month, HuffPost Arts will go up on the site. Both verticals will start off national, but will eventually be an integral…

The Financial Times’ metered online paywall system is considered one of the more successful models, but a new partnership with location-based social net Foursquare is aimed at younger readers who are most resistant to paywalls. The partnership will launch sometime in the next few weeks, Business Insider reports. 

While most of the big players hoping to crack the local news market—from Everyblock to Yahoo (NSDQ: YHOO)—have chosen to primarily aggregate third-party info on their sites, AOL’s Patch has chosen an alternate—and costly—strategy: hiring full-time editors in dozens of markets across the country to produce original content about the…

The Huffington Post is launching a “Twitter edition” that is intended to serve as an extension and a distinct entity from the main news and opinion site, the company told paidContent. The primary purpose is to harness the social networking aspects of the site to create a real-time news service…

With the 2010 baseball season just underway, ESPN (NYSE: DIS) is expanding the number of individual teams covered on SweetSpot, the baseball blog network it started last October. SweetSpot launched with eight teams during the 2009 playoff season and the ESPN has now added another 11 sites, which are run…

While online directory Yelp has gotten more popular, it’s also been finding the levels of dissatisfaction from small business owners and commenters has been been rising at the same time. Jeremy Stoppelman, Yelp’s co-founder and CEO, tells the NYT’s Bits blog that the changes will involve more transparency, which is…

Online events registration service Eventbrite—which already counts YouTube co-founder Jawed Karim and Bebo co-founder Michael Birch among its backers—has now added Yelp CEO Jeremy Stoppelman as an investor. Eventbrite, which raised $6.5 million in a round in November, isn’t saying how much Stoppelman is putting into the company. Stoppelman will…

Ebay is trying—again—to challenge Craigslist in the U.S. classifieds market with a relaunch of its Kijiji classifieds site. The company is renaming the site eBay (NSDQ: EBAY) Classifieds—a move which it says provides “a familiar and trusted brand name” to buyers. And it’s emphasizing several attributes that position the free…

Canada’s Yellow Pages Group appears to be on something of a buying binge in the past month, as the Montreal-based directory publisher has acquired Canpages for $225 million (U.S. $220 million). This is YPG’s third acquisition within the past few weeks. Canpages, whose full name is Canadian Phone Directories Holdings,…

Facebook is paving the way for its forthcoming location-sharing feature with yet another update to its privacy policy. In a blog post, Facebook says—opaquely—it has “added the concept of a ‘place’ that could refer to a Page, such as one for a local restaurant” to the document. The new privacy…

AOL’s Patch—which is in the midst of a blistering expansion—is now moving into the non-profit journalism space. The company says it will partner with “community foundations and other organizers” to set up hyperlocal news sites in communities “around the world that lack adequate news media and online local information resources.”…

Location-based ad startup Placecast has added $3 million in additional funding. The company says it will use the cash to expand its ‘ShopAlerts’ service, which sends people promotional text messages when they’re near a specific retail location. (It’s all opt-in). This is a double hot space—with both Google (NSDQ: GOOG)…

The NYTCo’s local content efforts are getting a quick boost from hyperlocal newswire Fwix. In a sense, the deal with Fwix can buttress the NYTimes.com’s New York metro area blogs program, The Local, which it began last year. The deal enables the distribution of Fwix’s technology and hyperlocal content across…