In 2009, Forrest Media was a winner in an international contest for news startups hosted by the Knight Foundation. Its project, dubbed CityCircles, created a new content-management system that helps people share information around locations that are geographically significant to hyperlocal communities.
The first implementation of CityCircles was applied to the light rail transit community in the Phoenix-metro area in Arizona. It allowed people to share news, events, classifieds, community projects and merchant specials around each train station along the METRO line, a 20-mile stretch of train tracks through the heart of the city.
Users can easily write headlines, add text and photos, and then click inside a unique map that automatically places that information on the main map for the website. If they can’t identify the exact location associated with that piece of information, they can type in an address and the system will automatically reverse geocode it for them. Here’s a look:
