My friend Matylda Czarnecka has a story and video on the Bakersfield.com real estate site about my neighborhood, College Heights. It’s my favorite neighborhood in Bakersfield. I like it better even than Oleander, and certainly better than anything in the Southwest.

This piece is a good example of the kind of content newspaper sites should be creating for verticals. It isn’t news, but it isn’t fluff either. It’s not traditional advertorial, where some advertiser gets shallow promotional copy. No Realtor, for example, is mentioned at all. But for somebody looking for housing in Bakersfield, it’s a chance to learn a little about a neighborhood. It can help lend stickiness to a vertical, strengthen the brand, and lead to the kind of return visits that eventually generate clicks and leads for advertisers. It will help preempt competitors, or at least ensure that the newspaper vertical is a strong part of the competitive mix.

You can see how content is being played on the vertical by visiting the RE home page.