Spanish-language online and print news publisher impreMedia wants to get hyperlocal, introducing community blogging partnerships that will initially launch in Hispanic-heavy New York and Los Angeles, chairman and CEO John Paton announced at the 62nd Annual Congress of the World Association of Newspapers in Hyderabad, India.

The company said it will set up impreMedia Community E-Journalism Media Labs in its newsrooms in those two cities—at El Diario La Prensa in New York and La Opinion in Los Angeles—to assist local bloggers in their efforts at covering the community. Bloggers will participate in four-week orientation sessions at the labs, which the company expects to be up and running by early 2010.

Excerpts from Paton’s speech in India:

Our plan was to acquire the most reputable Hispanic newspapers in the country in key markets—Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, San Francisco, Houston, etc.—and then invest in them to improve both the journalism and the various media platforms demanded by today’s news consumers. And that we did, until our company, like all the other media companies in the United States—particularly newspaper companies—ran smack into the biggest economic recession since the Great Depression. This is an industry, I don;t have to tell you, that has seen some of the greatest newspaper titles in the world close or declare bankruptcy.

The great newspaper editor Sir Harry Evans once said: “A newspaper is an argument on its way to a deadline.” We had to first understand what that argument is in the Hispanic community and, more important, what deadline means in a world with Twitter, SMS texting, instant messaging and social media. Armed with laptops, Internet connections and multiuse cell phones, the world is rapidly becoming a place where anyone can be a one-person news bureau. The barriers to entry to our business have fallen.

This isn’t just a question of resource constraints. Bloggers and small online news organizations are increasingly competing and beating larger media companies, particularly on the local front. If newspaper organizations want to be hyperlocal (and they better want to), then they will have to harness the power of bloggers. And that means we in mainstream media will have to help them make a decent living. The new news ecology and their place in it are here to stay.

During those weeks (the four-week orientation sessions), they will meet with editors to discuss issues we think are important, and we will listen to what they think is important. We will discuss what type of content is suitable for us and vice-versa. We will set up ways for them to alert us on what they have so we can highlight online or through our own multiplatform systems, including print. Their sites would also carry our widgets.