Topix Gives Up News Aggregation to Focus on Local Community
Important Details: Building on its experience with user forums, news aggregator Topix gave itself a near-complete makeover this week. Out: the busy, headline-packed, “all-kinds-of-news” news aggregator site that allowed readers to localize by zip code or topicalize by vertical segment. In: a city/zip-centered page with the latest news, forum posts, and comments from….people like you. The promise: “a locally community-edited blog for every town in America,” down to 32,000 zip codes.
The new Topix, found both at the newly bought address of Topix.com as well as for now at the old Topix.net, squarely has bet its future on local focus and on user interaction and creation with news. Readers can apply to qualify as Topix editors, adding content or voting on how to re-order local pages; these “editors” have their own profile pages, a la both MySpace and the recent USAToday social media launch. The idea: as the ranks of local editors grow, reaching a kind of critical mass per zip, they replace what Topix calls “roboblogger,” meaning the algorithm that has long decided which stories best fit which zip codes.
The new Topix idea, according to CEO Rich Skrenta, builds both on the Open Directory project, in which Topix’s founders were involved, and on Wikipedia, with its wisdom-of-the-writing-crowds ethic. You can read more about Skrenta’s re-invention on his Topix blog post.
“We haven’t created a Facebook or a MySpace for our investors (newspaper companies Tribune, Gannett and McClatchy own 75% of the company) yet,” Skrenta told Outsell. “We’re not a great site yet.”
Skrenta says the makeover came from watching the site and the logs. “We see the most amazing stories being posted on our forums, where we had a one million users last year.” The forum usage removes the hurdles of a user “having to become a blogger.” When news is about what’s happening down the street, people are more likely, he says, to post about it. As with other similar experiments, Skrenta suggests that a 100-1 ratio currently applies, meaning for every hundred people reading posts, “community journalism” or comments, one of them actually writes for the site. He believes that’s a sustainable ratio.
In Outsell’s Opinion: Topix’s re-positioning comes at a curious time. Big news aggregators like Google and Yahoo! are deep in discussions with news publishers on the economics of this new world. Start-ups from DayLife to NewsTrust to NewsVines to Breitbart are all playing with news aggregation formulas, algorithms, user ranking and presentation, in an effort to get right what plainly is a work in progress for serious newsreaders. Topix had fit somewhere between the big aggregator and the start-ups.
Now it’s joined the user-generated crowd, much more Digg-like, but around local. At re-launch, the site is likely to appeal most to those who enjoyed Topix forums and the give-and-take within them. The actual news output per zip is underwhelming. In losing its density, Topix has lost its depth and breadth, at least for the time being. How fast editors will take to building highly useful and denser local sites will determine whether this experiment will succeed.
People are the middleware here, and that holds uneven promise.
As is the focus of such sites as NowPublic, “citizen editors” can unearth small and large topics of public interest and sometimes national discourse. Consider the ballooning controversy of the firing of eight U.S. attorneys. As Journalism.org put it: “The story was pieced together over several months from local papers with a blog playing the role of clearing house, reporter, and dot connector, in this case, liberal blogger, Joshua Micah Marshall’s TalkingPoints.com.”
What we’re seeing here is a new role for that group formerly known as the audience. Yes, they will always be readers, but they’ll also be contributors, eyes, and ears out there connecting in new ways with the public, and importantly with professional journalists themselves. Numerous journalists have recently raised the question of what’s going to happen with their craft as budgets erode. San Francisco Chronicle columnist David Lazarus headlined it this way: “Who Will Get the Story?” in a recent column. Indeed it looks like the funnel will be widening at the top — story ideas — as it narrows as to what goes onto the printed page. But on the web, expect lots more “journalism” — the trick will be sorting out the wheat from the chaff now on steroids.
That sorting in this case will include, according to Topix, at least 100 journalists from its owner papers, who have signed up as Topix editors.
How Topix’s owners view this transformation will be curious to see. Topix has been an under-performer for them, both financially and as a spur to their own best use of local content. As those owner parents re-think their basic businesses, their child is doing it right along with them.
Implications: