Topix's CEO on the Future of

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  macnamband09/24/08 Report as spam
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  RE: Topix's CEO on the Future of "Micro-Local" News

  If this is really Mr. Tolles'idea of journalism ??? to get lots of audience attention and engagement. Period...??? If this is not sarcasm then Mr. Tolles has his own problem with arrogance and ignorance. And I suppose, cynicism. The job of a journalist is to collect raw information, synthesize it, check it, and present it. The motive, as quaint as it may sound, as outdated as it sounds, is not to engage an audience; it is to report to an audience. And you can still find that. The profession's decline is because it has moved away from a reporter's medium, first to an editor's medium and now finally to a publisher's medium. It has come full circle from where it was a century ago, which is full circle from where it was in the century before that and so on back to Daniel Defoe. How ironic that the likes of Mr. Tolle simultaneously encourage and undermine their golden egg, which is still, through the dawn's early light, and with all the faults, one of the few good checks and balances still working in this society....

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  hotweir09/24/08 Report as spam
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  RE: Topix's CEO on the Future of

  I think he was being sort of provocative with me because he knew I was a journalist. But his vision of the future for news includes journalists, bloggers, and citizens, so it is pretty much a mixed model, as opposed to the "who needs journalists at all" approach. The main takeaway for me was the hyper-local model for news, which is quite intriguing -- especially as newspapers disappear from many markets...

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  markjosephson09/25/08 Report as spam
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  RE: Topix's CEO on the Future of

  We're big fans of what Chris and his team are doing at Topix.
  
  Let's give points for being provocative here and drawing attention to a really important point: new technologies and businesses are drastically changing traditional media models.
  
  Businesses that aggregate local content like Topix and Outside.in are proving to be more effective at building scale and audience for advertisers than many of the stand-alone "traditional" media businesses.
  
  There's no denying that traditional media properties need to evolve and that part of that is an increased focus on products, technologies and content designed primarily to effectively scales audience.
  
  That doesn't change that there will always be a role -- a need -- for great journalism. That should never go away.

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  David P Hamilton09/25/08 Report as spam
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  RE: Topix's CEO on the Future of

  I'd personally be a lot more receptive to Tolles' ideas if the Topix site itself wasn't such a mess. Every time a search leads me to Topix -- most recently a few months ago when I was reporting a story out of Half Moon Bay, Calif., a coastal town of roughly 12,000 people -- I usually end up with a news bite usually no more than a sentence long whose source has long since expired. The commentary is usually no great shakes, either, even on the pages devoted to particular communities -- and those pages themselves are so busy and unfocused that I really wonder how useful locals find them.
  
  Of course, I'm one of those arrogant journalists, so what do I know. I have no beef with the concept of microlocal news; it's just the Topix implementation of it that drives me nuts.

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  Ted Buerger09/26/08 Report as spam
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  RE: Topix's CEO on the Future of

  In our experience at AmericanTowns.com, the thirst for news and other information at the "micro-local" level is very real, and matched by a desire of local organizations to reach their community with news about the good and important things that they are doing. The affirmative sharing of local information, ideas, and efforts are the basis of our sense of "community", our attachment to the place we call our hometown or neighborhood. Initially, the web tended to pull us away from that local community (and from our local newspaper), giving us helpful information on narrow topics of interest but not connecting us with the wide range of interests and opinions that characterize each of our towns.
  
  But now the web, the revolutionary tool to bring together information and people, is responding to people's needs for local information, resources and connection. It is not yet determined how the huge advertising dollars seeking this local audience will allow us to fund the journalists we need and to otherwise "find and share" the information most important to our daily lives. But, call it micro-local if you will, it's the real "community" that each of us belongs to, and it's here to stay.

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  hotweir09/26/08 Report as spam
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  RE: Topix's CEO on the Future of

  Thanks for your comments, Ted, David and both Mark(s). I agree about the demand for local information and the Web's role in satisfying it. I'm insanely curious about my own neighborhood and the neighbors I've never met, but also about other places I've lived in the past. David also nailed the weakness at Topix --
  I didn't get into the design or navigation of the site, which is not first-rate, since I was concentration on the hyper-local content and ad model in this piece.

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  WoundedtIcon03/03/09 Report as spam
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  RE: Topix's CEO on the Future of

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