{"id":903,"date":"2007-01-15T19:45:08","date_gmt":"2007-01-16T00:45:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mathewingram.com\/work\/2007\/01\/15\/newspapers-and-local-who-owns-who\/"},"modified":"2007-01-15T19:45:08","modified_gmt":"2007-01-16T00:45:08","slug":"newspapers-and-local-who-owns-who","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/2007\/01\/15\/newspapers-and-local-who-owns-who\/","title":{"rendered":"Newspapers and local – who owns who?"},"content":{"rendered":"

(cross-posted from my media blog<\/a>)<\/i><\/p>\n

Don Dodge has some thoughts<\/a> about newspapers and local content — like restaurant reviews, movie reviews, etc. — that got their start with a post from Greg Linden of Findory (which Greg said recently is shutting down, or at least going into hibernation) on the same topic<\/a>. Greg’s post in turn was based on a very perceptive post by Rich Skrenta, CEO of Topix (a local news aggregator), about how newspapers generally suck at making their content available<\/a> to search engines where they can become part of the “long tail.”<\/p>\n

All of this drew some skeptical fire from my friend Rob Hyndman, who said in his post that newspapers shouldn’t own<\/a> local search. His reasoning (expressed both in his post and in an email discussion with me): newspapers may have local content, but that doesn’t mean they can necessarily compete with other, better sources of content that are faster and more flexible than newspapers are — even assuming that papers can solve their archive and searchability issues.<\/p>\n

\"starnewsroom.jpg\"<\/p>\n

Needless to say, I think that newspapers have a slightly better chance than Rob does, but that’s not just because I work for one. I will agree that trying to convince local-content searchers to come to a newspaper site — which Rob also criticizes in his post<\/a> — doesn’t make a whole heck of a lot of sense. But that doesn’t mean newspapers can’t make use of their content by making it easier for search engines and other aggregation mechanisms to find.<\/p>\n

Maybe newspapers can’t compete with other local sources (like Yelp, which Mindy McAdam likes<\/a>), either because they don’t have compelling enough content or because they don’t know what they are doing technology-wise, or because they are just clueless and handicapped in a variety of ways. But they can certainly do a heck of a lot better than they are now. Pramit Singh has some good suggestions<\/a> at MediaVidea<\/p>\n

<\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

(cross-posted from my media blog) Don Dodge has some thoughts about newspapers and local content — like restaurant reviews, movie reviews, etc. — that got their start with a post from Greg Linden of Findory (which Greg said recently is shutting down, or at least going into hibernation) on the same topic. Greg’s post in … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “Newspapers and local – who owns who?”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_crsspst_to_mathewingramblogwordpresscom":false,"mf2_syndication":[],"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-903","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/903","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=903"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/903\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=903"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=903"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=903"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}