(FORTUNE Small Business) – As in politics, all of March Madness is local. That's why the event is a slam dunk for Scout.com founder Jim Heckman's network of 40 monthly sports fanzines and 200 websites providing obsessive coverage of each of the 64 squads in the college basketball tournament. "Major media companies aren't built to cover 64 teams," says Heckman, 39, who started Seattle"based Scout.com when he realized local sports sites and magazines were all buying redundant services. In return for inking a long"term contract, he offered to manage and market their publications-and spread their news to a wider audience-for a split of ad revenues and subscriptions. Now national advertisers can go native on a swath of local sites or sponsor a March Madness portal, which has landed deals as high as $500,000. Madness may be local, but going national proved sane: Reporting teams covering the largest schools, which on their own made less than $50,000 annually, now average some $200,000 a year. -- I.M.