Yule Heibel's Library tagged local_news →  View Popular, Search in Google

What role do you see automated aggregation services playing in the news ecosystem?
 Aggregation is going to be a way in which news companies supplement their original content. There are several services that are attempting to do this like OneSpot and Mochila, but nobody has really tackled the problem of filtering content by user behavior or linguistic quality. We have a myriad of different algorithms we’re using to judge these two aspects of content to determine which pieces of content should be surfaced over others.

The true value to news in the future will be filtration of content and using technology to ensure that published news speaks well to user preferences and reader expectations. There aren’t enough editors in the world and there isn’t enough money to pay hundreds of editors to filter the growing online content universe.

How does news aggregation impact local newspapers?
 I think that the problem with the local newspaper is that it focuses too much on “generally applicable” stories. When I say ‘generally applicable,’ I’m referring to crime articles or republished AP content. Local newspapers have lost their touch as the medium for communicating the metropolitan Zeitgeist - likely due to declining revenue and, therefore, smaller staff.

Many people think the demise of the local newspaper is because of the Internet or Google; the truth is that Craigslist and eBay have done the most damage to the economics of the industry (ads and classified ads). The challenge is now reducing costs of getting content and filtering the content for users. I think that aggregated news is definitely information overload, and that’s why we’ve focused on building the filters and normalization - all proprietary technology - that makes this aggregated news more readable, useful and valuable. Of the stories we aggregate, only 5-10% of them actually reach users through Fwix.com.

Can automated systems evaluate the quality of news content?
 Yes. Academics have been writing about judging content quality for years. Several algorithms are available for determining the quality of content and the relevance of content to specific keywords, locations, or topics. There are only a few hundred people in the world that have experience developing these algorithms into production.

How does aggregation impact revenue for niche, small sites or larger ones?
 For larger news companies and sites, we’ve found that local content opens lots of doors in the advertising world. Media buyers who represent large brands like Best Buy and The Home Depot are looking for ways to sell advertising around local content. National brands with local presence are eager to sell advertising to consumers who are consuming local content.

An advertisement with coupons for the local Home Depot isn’t useful when shown next to an article about the current state of political strife in Iraq, but is quite applicable when shown next to an article written by a San Francisco home improvement blogger. Large news companies looking to sell local advertising need local content to do this well and we believe we are the best provider of that content. The costs of building out content for every metro in the US are also too great for news companies. Technology is the only way to do local well.

For smaller sites, engagement and additional ad revenue are probably the most valuable benefits of integrating with Fwix. We offer ad click revenue to blogs that add our widgets, which is called AdWire, to their site. Additionally, bloggers and smaller news sites have seen value in getting return visitors who are looking for a mixture of original content and syndicated local content.

Did you raise money from investors? How did you go about that? 

 Yes, we raised a high-six-figure sum from a group of angel investors. There are some friends and family in the deal, and there are also professional investors who did it as a personal angel investment. The success of the fundraising was very much dependent on my track record and reputation as editor in chief of the Industry Standard, and required relentless networking and cajoling over a period of almost a year. 

What is the revenue model for New West? Advertising? 

 Online advertising is the core of the model, yes. However we also have several other revenue lines, including a small indoor advertising business, a custom-publishing business, and a conference & events business. Multiple revenue streams are a lovely thing. It remains difficult to make money on online advertising alone unless and until you have boatloads of traffic, and it is especially difficult to achieve that with a local site. 

Everyblock was funded through a Knight News Challenge Grant and they've come crossroads as Adrian explains: 

 But now we've reached an interesting point in our project's growth: our grant ends on June 30, and, under the terms of our grant, we're open-sourcing the EveryBlock publishing system so that anybody will be able to take the code to create similar sites. That's a Good Thing, in that EveryBlock's philosophies and tools will have the opportunity to spread around the world much faster than we could have done on our own, but it puts the six of us EveryBlockers in an odd spot. How do we sustain our project if our code is free to the world? 

 What do you think? How can they keep the project alive and perhaps even make it profitable if they are providing development resources to the competition?

The software enables something Pelago's chief technology officer, Darren Erik Vengroff, calls social discovery: using the iPhone's map and self-location features, as well as information about the prior activities of the user's friends, Whrrl proposes new places to explore or activities to try.

"If you think about your day-to-day life and how you discover things around you and places to go, to a great extent the source of that information is your friends," Vengroff says. With Whrrl, a user can "look through the eyes of friends and see the places they find compelling." The software begins with the user's position on the iPhone's map and indicates a smattering of nearby establishments. If the user's friends have visited and rated these places, the software indicates that as well. The map also shows the positions of nearby friends who have enabled a feature that lets them be seen by others.