Blog Loving 3.0: Top Five Economic Development Blogs
November 7, 2018 | By: daniel
Every year, marketing content is becoming more digital, and organizations are embracing these changes by focusing on blogs to deliver brand messages to their online target audiences. While there are blogs covering any topic you can imagine, we compiled a list of the top five economic development blogs capturing the latest trends in the industry.
Here are five of our favorite blogs, in no particular order:
Strengthening Brand America
Strengthening Brand America is written by Edward Burghard. The blog focuses on helping economic development professionals in the U.S. understand the power of place branding and how it can be used as a strategy to become more globally competitive and attract new investment.
The blog is comprised of monthly posts highlighting various topics including advertising, event marketing and online marketing in economic development. This blog is a great resource for providing tips and education for economic development organizations.
Strong Towns Media
Strong Towns is a non-profit, non-partisan organization that strives to help America’s towns achieve financial resiliency by focusing on how cities are built.
Strong Towns posts both online stories and podcasts that tackle hot topics such as urbanism issues, downtown development and infrastructure, offering up great information for economic development professionals.
Urbanophile
Urbanophile is written by Aaron M. Renn. He is a Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, where he focuses on urban, economic development and infrastructure policy.
The blog highlights American cities and how they find success in the 21st century, hitting on topics such as culture, demographics and branding. It’s a great tool for any economic developer seeking information on other cities’ success and nationwide trends.
New Geography
New Geography explores the places people chose to live and work. It is written by economic development thought leader Joel Kotkin, who has been described by the New York Times as America’s “uber-geographer.”
Joel, as well as various other contributing bloggers, write about societal trends in geography. They focus on analyzing data from all over the globe, making it a great place to gain further insight into demographics.
urbanSCALE
urbanSCALE is written by John Karras, an experienced leader in economic development. It’s purpose is to give economic developers and urban planners the information and resources to make their destinations stand out from the rest.
The blog features plenty of roundups covering nationwide trends in downtown development, revitalization, transportation and more. It also highlights specific cities’ accomplishments, making it a great location for economic developers to learn about other region’s successes.
Bonus:
At the risk of sounding self-promotional, two other great economic development blogs to check out are DCI Chairman, Andy Levine’s, Forbes blog on economic development as well as DCI News & Views found on our website and featuring original content and research on the latest industry trends and news. DCI also hosts a podcast, The Project: Inside Corporate Location Decisions.