Knowing absolutely nothing about this, let me just throw a random idea out there:
Split the work up so that you are just providing the service to partners in local communities. You can manage the tech centrally, and anything else that can benefit from centralization (national ad network, AP-style content, etc), but farm out the actual micro-sites to local partners.
Of course you probably want to run a couple of them yourself so you understand the market and the pain points. And you'll probably have to bootstrap pretty hard to get critical mass.
But at some point it seems like you could be providing services to established local organizations (like newspapers), and potentially become profitable while charging those organizations an order of magnitude less than what it would take to cook up their own site from scratch.
The key would really be understanding what all these local community organizations have in common.
Split the work up so that you are just providing the service to partners in local communities. You can manage the tech centrally, and anything else that can benefit from centralization (national ad network, AP-style content, etc), but farm out the actual micro-sites to local partners.
Of course you probably want to run a couple of them yourself so you understand the market and the pain points. And you'll probably have to bootstrap pretty hard to get critical mass.
But at some point it seems like you could be providing services to established local organizations (like newspapers), and potentially become profitable while charging those organizations an order of magnitude less than what it would take to cook up their own site from scratch.
The key would really be understanding what all these local community organizations have in common.