Television stations owned by NBC in the United States are using technology from Internet start-up Outside.in that allows users to zero in on their neighbourhoods, The Associated Press reported.

For example, rather than have one site for all of New York City, NBC will use Outside.in to create automatic subsections containing neighbourhood-related content.

About 650 neighbourhoods are available in nine markets in the United States on Outside.in, including New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, San Francisco, San Diego, Washington, D.C., Hartford, Connecticut and Dallas-Fort Worth. The start-up is working on a new site for Miami, the AP reported in an article posted by Media InfoCenter.

As news organisations have less staff trying to do more, hyper-localisation is taken care of by Outside.in, which will automatically customise news and information for each neighbourhood by scanning online content (NBC content as well as all outside content) and assigning it to neighbourhoods based on attributes such as business names or addresses mentioned in the content, the AP reported.

"The community is reporting on itself today, and you need to take advantage of that," said Mark Josephson, according to the AP.

Brian Buchwald, senior vice president for local integrated media at NBC, owned by General Electric Co., told the AP that he doesn't think Outside.in is "going to be our saviour, (but) this is an incremental process, and aggregation/hyper-local content will be an important piece of the puzzle."