The Aspen Institute Communications and Society Program is organizing an event focused on News Cities: The Next Generation of Healthy Informed Communities on August 16, starting at 10:30 a.m. eastern time, which will be an interactive livestream. The Twitter hashtag for this event is #FOCAS10. Their aim is to ‘develop a set of actionable steps to improve the information health of communities.’ This builds on work of the Knight Commission on the Information Needs of Communities in a Democracy, and renewed focus in the UK on the role of the Internet and the media in local communities. This includes work at the Rowntree Foundation, as well as a local TV review launched by the coalition government. All to say that the local is coming into a sharper focus for research, policy and practice.From my perspective, the local is indeed the new frontier of the global Internet.