Topix Uses Citizen Journalists to Revitalize Local News
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Written By Kate Zimmermann | April 2, 2007 | Share This
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Topix.net, a popular news aggregator, is adopting citizen journalism as a way to fill in local content. From the Topix blog,
“Today Topix is launching a new platform for citizen journalism on the web. We started in 2004 by automatically aggregating the news and localizing it by ZIP code. But based on the rapid growth we’ve seen in the past year in our local forums (1M users!), we’re now inviting members from our hyperlocal communities to take over the controls and help us edit the news.”
The reinvention comes after an introspective study of Topix.net. As Rich Skrenta, CEO of Topix, writes,
“As cool a technical trick as our aggregated geolocalized news pages were, they actually pretty much sucked. Thus began a six-month self-examination of why, exactly, our product sucked, and what we could do to un-suckify it.”
By re-arranging the homepage and inviting readers to act as editors, Topix hopes to turn their millions of readers into a participatory community. Interestingly, Topix pointedly states that it’s not just another “digg clone” - they’ll keep their aggregation technology, use blog-style formating, encourage wikipedia-esq participation, and operate like DMOZ. Finally, the site is supported by Adsense.
Though many bloggers praise the new site as “the obvious next move“, Topix may run into issues with the quality of user-submitted content. They’ve chosen to employ in-house human reviewers (a la DMOZ), which could lead to a new plateau in their ability to filter quality content.
Topics: Social Media |