Community blog/forum for small city

Anyone been able to make a financial success of it?

[anax]

I live in a fairly small (~40,000) city with a mostly blue-collar population. There are some scattered web services around the town (city hall, public library website, local art museum, local newspaper, etc.), but not a lot that's very active or professional, and no real locally-focused blogs or forums that I've seen.

I'm wondering if there might be a niche here for a city group-blog or forum site, supported by AdSense. There's plenty of local news and issues for discussion; I was thinking maybe a small group of people with original posting access to a "city-online.com" blog, that would then be open for commenting by the public (with registration). Schools, parks, business development, local recreation and culture, housing, politics, etc., all might be topics.

Has anyone has any success (from a financial point of view) with websites of this kind? My sense is that it could become popular as a site, since the market is fairly empty, but whether it would actually generate any ad revenue is another matter.

Opinions are welcome.

[SlimKim]

i think the idea has merit but it's hard to say how small is to small

one can look at the many classified sites and see potential for large city classified sites / forum / blogs

you might be surprised how easy it would be to cover your state or a larger city in your state

think of it as you are 150 years back in time and wondering if a newspaper would be a good idea