I came up with some ideas for subforums. I just created a subforum in my instance called "Made in Poland". The idea is to share polish both big and small local businesses so that polish people who are more conscious of the need of supporting their own economic environment this way have a nice source of data.
I thought that this subforum could also be helpful for non polish people, like tourists that might want to buy local stuff when they visit. And in turn I thought about another forum for people who maybe would want to know about my country. Havent yet made it but it would be a forum where people post things about Poland that every visitor, every person interseted in our country should know. Probably only good stuff (XD I mean every country has their dark side, but maybe thats for a even different subforum XD) that we are most proud of, you know. Like best places to see, best food to eat, events and so on.
And I thought that maybe you might wanted to do something analogous but for USA (I assume that's HC's country of origin, unless your aiming at being an international instance, but that still doesnt exclude possibility I talking about )? So you could similarly do subforum called "Made in USA" and "Best of USA" or something like that for people that are not from US. I'm not sure if this would be practical given the fact how enormous your country is but maybe? So maybe don't include companies like Apple or Google which I think everyone knows are from US and I'm not sure if nowadays these companies are best examples of companies to be proud of (saying that and I'm still using google products every day xd). And also best of "USA" would be place to show what you are most proud of about your country, best places to see etc for non US people to know when they visit or just want to know. Maybe in your case it would be better to create more fragmented subforums? Idk
Just food for thought
EDIT: I removed part about covering news by each instance. Not sure if it makes sense. At least for you I mean. Plenty of sources to find on the web I guess. In our case though its different cause only polish know polish so maybe that's something to think about.