Mike Shapiro

Mike Shapiro is passionate about enabling people to own their own local news and digital marketing businesses, be their own boss, and achieve financial success, all while helping their community at the same time.

In 2008, Mike started an all-online local news site in his old hometown of New Providence, New Jersey. Soon, residents in neighboring towns requested that he start sites in their towns. After launching several more local news sites, he left his job to focus on local news full-time. As he received more and more requests from people to start local news sites in their towns, he had to decline because he could not manage more sites himself. This led him to think about how to expand while keeping the sites local and producing high-quality, objective local news. About seven years ago, Mike came up with the idea of franchising local news—finding people who wanted to start TAPinto as their own business and providing them with the technology, training, support, and continuing education they needed to succeed.

TAPinto took off, and today, it has grown to include more than 90 franchised online local news sites producing award-winning journalism, achieving record traffic and financial success. TAPinto is now one of the only sustainable, scalable local journalism models in the country.

In 2024, after speaking with many print newspaper publishers, hyperlocal news site owners, and radio stations in the local news space who expressed interest in the TAPinto platform and digital revenue streams but wanted to keep their own branding, Mike created the Hyperlocal News Network. This new content management system, designed specifically for media companies, combines robust operational and strategic online solutions to drive both audience and revenue while maintaining their unique branding.

This new collaborative and scalable content management system allows publishers in the network to seamlessly share content and advertising with one another, supporting local news and advertising. The Hyperlocal News Network offers the same world-class back-office support that TAPinto franchisees receive, but on an a la carte basis. Publishers can select the services they need and only pay for those. Thanks to the scale of the operation, back-office support services are offered at a fraction of the cost that publishers would incur if they purchased them independently.

Mike’s ultimate vision is to create a collaborative network of TAPinto franchisees and Hyperlocal News Network licensees, all operating on the same platform and tech stack, enabling them to fully leverage the benefits of scale.