Category Archives: topix

New York Times: Small-Town Gossip Moves to the Web, Anonymous and Vicious

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"Topix, a site lightly trafficked in cities, enjoys a dedicated and growing following across the Ozarks, Appalachia and much of the rural South, establishing an unexpected niche in communities of a few hundred or few thousand people — particularly in what Chris Tolles, Topix’s chief executive, calls “the feud states.” One of the most heavily trafficked forums, he noted, is Pikeville, Ky., once the staging ground for the Hatfield and McCoy rivalry. “We’re running the Gawker for every little town in America,” Mr. Tolles said."

Howard Owens: Why nobody clicks on your home page links

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"... newspaper.coms are foolish to let aggregation sites such as Topix display all of their headlines and leads. Topix is in the business of creating a substitute home page for your community news. ... Compare Topix, however, to a site like Google News. Google News drives a significant amount of traffic to news sites. Why? Because it has one primary purpose: to drive traffic to news sites."

On the (Citizen) Media

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NPR’s On the Media has an excellent summary of the state of the art in networked journalism in the form of its report from last week’s Networked Journalism summit in New York.

There’s nothing terribly new here, but the nine-minute package is a great introduction to the topic for the uninitiated. Have a listen:

The crowdsourced story in Ft Myers comes up, plus more about the concept of “crowdsourcing” from Wired’s Jeff Howe, who coined the term.

Robin Hamman talks about the flood of material that the BBC receives and how it needs to be careful to specify that it does not want people send in pictures of fluffy kittens.

Also mentioned are local news aggregator, Topix, Jay Rosen on AssignmentZero and why it didn’t work as expected, Mark Potts on why Backfence failed, a discussion of Talking Points Memo’s crowdsourcing of the US attorney documents as an example of a rare networked journalism project not linked in some way with a large news organisation, and and Jeff Jarvis on why experimenting with innovative collaboration between amateurs and professionals is the way forward — and essential for the latter.

Update: On Jeff Jarvis’s Buzzmachine blog and elsewhere, Jay Rosen responds at great length to the reference to AssignmentZero in the OTM package. OTM’s Bob Garfield has replied to Rosen’s criticisms.