Today the Seattle Times announced an editorial partnership with four local news publishers. Obviously, this caught our attention. A major news publisher working with and driving traffic to hyperlocal sites is part of how we envision the new news ecosystem. Thus, we do commend the Seattle Times for taking this encouraging first step and embracing the notion of aggregation, connecting with their community, and taking note of the wealth of great local content being produced in their backyard. But how will this really work? Is this the beginning of a new news model or an interesting experiment? Well, there are some issues that should be addressed.
- Limited Content: Why isolate this to just four content publishers? Why not 20? Why not 100? If you were the publisher, wouldn’t you want access to ALL the great content producers in your market? Seattle is a blog-rich metro with hundreds of local bloggers (we capture over 300 sources in this market). The barriers to entry to becoming a content producer are extremely low. New content producers are popping up everyday that the Seattle Times won’t have direct access to. My Ballard may have the best coverage on a specific event one day but the next day it might come from an unknown new blogger. If I were the editor, I’d want access to it all rather than limiting myself to an exclusive set of a few local publishers and possibly alienating everyone else out there.
- Lack of Scale and Automation: Without these two elements, this initiative will likely prove to be challenging to manage on a day-to-day basis. For publishers in other cities that may want to adopt a similar strategy, no doubt the concerns will be around resources. Who will pick and choose what articles to link to and communicate with the bloggers? With so many news publishers strapped for resources, is this a realistic initiative to pull off successfully?
- Sustainability: This is a one-year ‘project’ funded by the Knight Foundation. A grant from the Knight Foundation via American University will fund a liaison at Seattle Times and provide a stipend to the participating local bloggers. What happens after one year? Who will continue to fund this ‘liaison’ and the bloggers? What seems to be missing is a sustainable model that builds a relationship with the local bloggers and encourages a constant exchange of content, inventory, and revenue–a model that can be replicated at other cities all over the country.
The solution to the above issues and many of the questions is pretty simple–organized aggregation. This is why we built Outside.in for Publishers–a product to automate and ease the efforts of collecting local content. We give you the ‘fire hose’ of all aggregated content organized by neighborhoods and places, along with simple tools to manage and curate all of this. As news constantly changes, we believe local publishers need this level of flexibility and control.
We will be watching to see how this Seattle partnership works out. As of now, it sounds like a great concept but in practice, I question whether this is a sustainable or an efficient strategy. We are excited to see more publishers like Seattle Times embracing the notion of working with smaller local content producers in their market to give bloggers the much-desired and deserved eyeballs and distribution. But publishers can do a lot more and faster. The tools are there… we invite you to see just how easy it is and take advantage of the opportunities.
