Posted on September 7, 2010 - by Wayne Sutton

Dear local media, we need you. Today’s a big day for the Raleigh-Durham tech community

Flickr photo By Olivander

Dear local media, that’s you News and Observer, WRAL, NBC17/MyNC, Triangle.com, ABC11 and more. Today’s a big day for the Raleigh-Durham tech community as two major achievements are happing in your own backyard. One, Launch Box Digital is having their kickoff event today where seven startups will make their pitches and start working in Launch Box 12 week accelerator program (no affiliation). The second is the opening of Raleigh’s new coworking space at Design Box downtown Raleigh. Both of these events are significant to the Triangle’s growing web/tech community and should they become successful could lead to future economic development for  the community, other startups, freelancers and companies looking to relocate to the Triangle.

Also as like the rest of the world, most media outlets cover what’s happening in tech communities such as Silicon Valley, Boston, MA, Austin, TX, Boulder, CO and New York and they often ignore what’s happening in their own communities. Sure they’re cover local companies that recieve 40 million dollars in venture capital or what Cisco, IBM, SAS or Lenovo is doing but what about the upcoming web tech startups? What about a follow up story on North Carolina’s first coworking space in Carrboro, Carrboro Coworking? Basically I’m saying we need you local media and I would hope you’ll understand that your coverage/support means a lot.

If you look at a few New York startups such as … Foursquare they’re often covered by the New York Times, WSJ and other media outlets.  Also various West Coast startups have the opportunity to be covered by the LA Times and other near media outlets that have national reach. Each time one of these publications covers a local startup it’s good for the community, the startup and the media outlet. Note I’m not saying give web/tech startups free press or advertising but what I’m saying is that you may have the next Foursquare or Google or Groupon right locally and it would be great to see you cover what’s happening locally in the technology space and not what we can read on a thousand of  tech blogs about the same companies.

Note, I know it’s kind of late in the day, and if you’re local media, expect a press release about the coworking space in your inbox soon. If you’re already planning to cover one or both of these projects great!

You can learn more about the Launch Box Digital Event here and the Design Box coworking announcement here: Design Box Announces Betabox Spaces.

Does your local media cover technology in your community?

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