Local media publications that promote urban innovation

- Alternative newsweeklies are one such outlet. Papers like Chicago Reader, LA Weekly, Village Voice have been important journalistic outlets bringing attention to key issues, such as the Chicago Reader series on the parking meter sell off in Chicago, the education reporting by LynNell Hancock of the Village Voice, etc.
- Local foodways publications. A number of regions have publications that are part of the Edible Communities network. In the DC region, there is now Edible DC, which succeeds Edible Chesapeake, which closed down a few years. Not affiliated with the EC network is the magazine, published out of Virginia, called Flavor.
- Local sustainability publications. Grid Magazine in Philadelphia is an example of local freely distributed publication that covers sustainability.

- Urbanism. Baltimore's Urbanite is an excellent monthly covering various topics on urban design, sustainability, etc.

- Social innovation.  Philadelphia has an online publication called Philadelphia Social Innovations Journal, which I think is quite interesting, since so many cities claim they are world class, but don't really contribute much to best practice development and innovation.

- Community newspapers.  Are good to have, partly as a medium for local advertising, which generally is too expensive in the big city paper, at least for small businesses, they can provide additional coverage on land use and other issues that may be ignored by the big paper.

These are especially important because many big city newspapers have dropped or downgraded the quality of their local news coverage generally, and the additional publication of zoned local news sections (e.g., the New York Times used to publish special local news sections on Sundays, the Washington Post had more extensive local news inserts, the Detroit News dropped their zoned editions, the Philadelphia Inquirer used to include locally targeted editorials for New Jersey and the Philadelphia suburbs in their local news section, etc.