How broken is the big news business? People get excited when big media give up links on their precious homepages and point to other Web sites. Bad news, big media. Your 'aggregation' is broken. It's slow and it decays to a narrower and narrower set of sources. For an example, pop by your local big media citywide news homepage and check out the list of the few third-party sources they link to day after day. It's a small set that in no way represents the breadth and diversity of the true local news web around you.
A step in the correct direction is Outside.in's OIP service. Outside.in for Publishers is an attempt to give local publishers tools to aggregate their local news web. It allows a publisher to set up feeds from sites and information sources that are added to a stream of (mostly!) relevant aggregated content. It's a start toward the edited, or curated, news web.
OIP is open for adjustments n
Much of what the big media so-called aggregation doesn't accomplish is achieved by the OIP service. It's fast, it's systematic and consistent and it draws on a growing web of sources, not the shrinking one you get when a web producer has to surf sites to find 'news' to 'aggregate.' It does what it is supposed to do -- create a flow of locally relevant news. And, unlike some of the experiences you get in the standard Outside.in or other geo aggregation systems, when a funky story shows up in the curated feed, an editor can step in to remove it and teach the system a lesson or two about editorial selection.
We tested it out in an admittedly sub-optimal region but still liked what we saw from the system.
OIP does Juneau AK
OIP: How about some editorially driven geolocation?
Still, we think there is room to do more for hyperlocal content producers. For one, there needs to be a better integration of purely original content in the OIP service. We know that the original content is the lifeblood of neighborhood news and information sites. We also know that tools that enable an edited local news web are a must have. The local space is ruled by the small and the independent. To move forward requires magic machines that allow one or two people to produce a massive content flow. While there are a few examples of neighborhood blogs that have graduated to the next step of the media business world and are hiring freelancers and building news teams, most must find a way to make a go of it as a part-time endeavor at best. OIP and tools like it will be part of the next generation of these true hyperlocal news sites that are able to break out from the ranks and grow beyond a soloist's hobby business. We're pretty sure they'll continue to find tools to curate the local news web useful even after they break out. The sites that don't? Well, hopefully the local big media is still around to 'aggregate' you.
