It’s created Mail Communities, a section of its webite divided in to typical “hyperlocal” indexes for 38 areas, with a mix of news authored in-house, picture galleries, Fish4 property listings and links to posts written by a selection of local bloggers...

Twenty-five blogs including Digbeth is Good, The Lichfield Blog and Bournville Village have agreed “for their content to be used by the Mail, in print and online, correctly credited and with links back to their site”, Trinity Mirror (LSE: TNI) says. “In return, RSS feeds from the hyperlocal sites will appear prominently within the Mail Communities section, and the Mail will make relevant pictures available for those sites taking part.”

Right now, though, it looks mostly like simply linking out to the blogs’ stories via their incoming feeds, than anything more major.

There’s no ad revenue-sharing partnership here or anything like that. But the blogs “will also have a say in how a proportion of the Birmingham Mail Charitable Trust’s donations are spent, and be able to set the agenda for four-times-a-year communities workshops”, the Mail says.

The site looks as mundane as all Trinity Mirror’s local websites, but editor David Brookes calls it “a truly innovative hyperlocal partnership”. We might beg to differ - linking out to approved local contributors is the least a newspaper could do nowadays…

It also points to the multiple different ways in which Trinity Mirror titles are now approaching local online add-ons…

Mail Communities is based on the publisher’s existing Teesside Gazette Communities, whose own “bloggers” write on the site itself. The Teesside sites do also link out to off-site material, but this one, for example, is incorrectly linking to articles, tweets and Foursquare check-ins from places like Melbourne, Australia, and Taranaki, New Zealand.

Meanwhile, Trinity Mirror’s Media Wales, rather than use the “hyperlocal” Communities approach seen in Teesside and Birmingham, is trying to use a bloggy format, yourCardiff and yourPonty, to produce a in-house news in a less formal way, including occasional guest submissions.

It’s the same idea Guardian Cardiff, too, is trying on the same patch.