At the Suburban Newspapers of America conference in Philadelphia this morning, Journal Register Company CEO John Paton made an announcement: The newspaper chain will soon be launching an online, hyperlocal news portal in Philly. A new step forward in the company’s “digital first” business model, the yet-to-be-named site’s content will come from a mix of journalists professional and amateur, curated by JRC editors. And it will leverage the partnerships the JRC already has in place with Yahoo (audience targeting) and Growthspur (contributor training).

Or, as Paton puts it: “crowd and cloud.”

The site will be a direct competitor to Philly’s existing establishment news sources: the Inquirer and the Daily News. And it’s no accident that Paton announced the project the day before the financially plagued papers are to be put to auction. (JRC also hired Daniel Sarko, its SVP of integrated sales, away from Philly.com.) “They’ve had that town to themselves for a long time,” he told me. “And I think there’s room in this new ecosystem for a whole bunch of people to play. I’m sure they’ll think we’re no threat at all — and I hope they keep on thinking that.”

The idea of the new site is to bolster both content and audience — on the cheap. (JRC, you’ll recall, declared bankruptcy last February; since Paton took the helm of the company shortly after that — with an advisory board that includes new media thinkers the likes of Jay Rosen and Jeff Jarvis — it’s been engaged in the Herculean task of restoring a network of small, Rust Belt papers to profitability. Remarkably, it’s getting close.) The new effort will tap into Philly’s existing content infrastructure — the hyperlocal blogs that have already sprung up to cover the area — and then give that content, via the hyperlocal news provider Outside.in, a singular publishing platform. (The site will also mark a continuation of JRC’s partnership with Growthspur, which trains would-be journos in both blogging and the dark arts of content monetization.) The details are still being worked out, but the idea is a mutualization of resources and revenues that will benefit all involved, from the local bloggers to the Journal Register Company to its partners — to, of course, the site’s consumers. Think TBD, Philly edition.

Think also: TBD, “inexpensive tools” edition. Though JRC will dedicate some of its resources to the new site — in particular, staffers will provide additional content, curation, and general editorial oversight — “we’re hoping that this will be largely crowd-supported,” Paton notes. JRC, after all, doesn’t have papers in metro Philly. “We’ve surrounded Philly with our properties, and so we’re able to provide some context” — but, then, generally not “right-downtown context.” For that, the site will rely on the bloggers who know the terrain; and in turn, Paton says, “we can bring depth to this, and we can bring curation to this.”

And that’s true of audience, as well. The site will apply JRC’s “digital first” approach…to users. Last week, JRC expanded its partnership with Yahoo — the latter company provides behavioral and geographical ad targeting to the newspaper chain — to include the Philadelphia market. That was “the sales piece,” Paton notes; the new site will be “the content piece.” The hoped-for end result? “We’re collectively creating audience, collectively creating content, at a very low price point.”

It’s a “hoped-for” result, though, because the site is still in its development stages. (Hence, again, the lack of name — “I figured TBD was taken,” Paton laughs.) But the CEO values transparency, even if it means unleashing a gestational product onto the market. “It’s a work in progress,” he says of the site. But he and the JRC staff figured, he says, “Let’s just announce it — we’ll get some help in finalizing it just from the announcement. And our solution will come out of that.”