Outside In Aims to Help Publishers Round Up Neighborhood News
Important Details: For many local and metro newspaper companies, it’s round-up time. As news companies cut back on their own staff and their own news content production, they realize they offer their online readers something they can’t offer much in print: other people’s news.
The web word is, of course, aggregation. That means rounding up, selecting and then pointing to worthwhile content produced by other news companies, community organizations and bloggers. Newspaper companies have been trying a number of variations on this theme for more than a decade, but have yet to find a high-traffic, high-revenue model that works. Into the quest for such a model lately has come Outside.in (and that’s the URL as well). Founded in 2007, the Brooklyn, N.Y.-based company aims “to organize and aggregate all the web’s information by location,” CEO Mark Josephson told Outsell. That’s an ambitious goal, of course, and one of keen interest to local newspapers who realize their future is in getting smaller and more local.
Outside.in’s definition of information is expansive, encompassing the many forms of newsy content that extend well beyond “stories.” Mainstream news, hyperlocal news, discussion, Twitter microposts, classifieds, events, blog posts, government reports — all are within its reach, through the indexing of 30,000 hyperlocal sources so far. That set of content is then geo-tagged by neighborhood, with a goal of getting to a two-block radius. “We want to connect papers to the long tail of coverage,” says Josephson, a web veteran, who has had stints at About.com and ad network company Seevast.
The company recently launched a beta version of a self-service platform that allows publishers to create hyperlocal-focused pages with targeted advertising for their sites. “Neighborhood News Pages” are the focus.
Media General is among the first companies to try the program. At its Richmond.com site, users see a prominent Google map, populated with Outside.in neighborhood links (resulting in “powered by Google” and “powered by Outside.in” nomenclature, a sign of the partnered times). Then, there’s a drop down menu allowing users to tailor the map to one of dozens of locales. Some locales have numerous entries; some only a few.
For the Richmond.com site, whose sister site is the newspaper-centric TimesDispatch.com, Outside.in provides the ability to stretch beyond newspaper content, cheaply and easily. “We wanted to provide a different type of news,” says Michael Fibison, general manager of Media General’s Central Virginia Interactive group. “We didn’t want it to look like the newspaper.”
Indeed, Outside.in’s neighborhood news is complemented by rounded-up community events calendars, via partner Zvents, (see our report, Zvents’ Local Push Is One to Watch, March 11, 2008) and community classifieds, rounded up beyond the Times Dispatch’s via partner Oodle. Overall, the idea is to create a wider, community experience and to fulfill the promise of the name: Richmond.com.
At this point, the Richmond.com site, acquired by Media General and re-launched last fall, gets about 1.5 million monthly uniques, to seven million for the newspaper site.
For Richmond.com, its parent paper is considered “nothing more than a data source,” says Fibison, emphasizing that Times-Dispatch is presented prominently — but only as it’s relevant to users within Richmond.com’s categories. If other content better suits readers’ needs, it gets priority.
Outside.in’s newspaper partnership initiative is based on ad revenue, with the company and its newspaper partners each able to sell advertising and keep resulting revenue; several variations on that theme are offered. The key: evolving knowledge of “local” customers and the matching of them with hyper-targeted ads. Josephson speaks of the power of networks (tying content and advertising together) and of aggregation, and adds “curation.” “Curation sits atop aggregation,” he says, indicating that after rounding up lots of hyperlocal content with relatively cheap technology, its the sense of selection, hierarchy and presentation that will make it valuable to readers.
Implications: We see incredible ferment as newspaper companies on both sides of the Atlantic try to understand the new local. Outsell believes the formula espoused by Outside.in makes sense: let ever-more-efficient technology do the heaviest lifting, saving cost, and then let editors and marketers do what they can do best.
The proof, of course, will be in the execution, whether that’s called curation or something else. The Washington Post, among others, has invested in hyperlocal, only to see the results produce too little for too much. The Post is now trying new techniques, as are papers large and small across the country.
Outsell believes that one key ingredient is real — and sustained — community outreach. The now-online-only SeattlePI.com, left with an editorial staff of 20 when its print paper closed, is moving with determination and savvy on its own regional aggregation model. It has involved both smart harnessing of technology (Seattle Tweets, aggregation up-to-the-minute news from other Seattle media) and the selection, recruitment, care and feeding of more than 150 community bloggers. That site will soon be borrowing a page from fellow Hearst site, SFGate.com (the home of the San Francisco Chronicle), which recently launched City Brights, signing up dozens of local notables to regularly blog. Those types of outreach, smartly combined with tech tools such as those provided by Outside.in, or Topix or Everyblock or MetaCarta or Helium, just to name a few, will become a foundation for new, growing business models.