. AOL (NYSE:AOL) has established a $10 million dedicated venture fund, which will invest in "local" startups. According to Digital Media Wire, AOL defines "local" startups as ones which "improve the local experience for consumers, businesses, governments, and organizations."
Previous:At this year's SXSW, Aol has used the event to officially test out Seed.com, its new content aggregator/journalism/freelancer Web site led by former New York Times tech journalist Saul Hansell.
Seed has solicited freelance writers to contribute articles for its music site Spinner , namely to cover the more than two thousand bands that will play this week at the festival.
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A panel during SXSW Interactive, on which The New York Times' David Carr was participating, discussed how web-based reporting could replace the newspaper were it to go out of business. Initially, the panel was supportive of The Times:
Then, they discussed some other models and how they might work:
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> Hot Potato Pulls in Tweets About SXSW Events
Saul Hansell, formerly of The New York Times and now at AOL's Seed, believes it's because "we've simply given consumers too much choice."
Speaking this week at the OMMA Behavioral conference, Hansell added that because the "supply of things you can read has increased multifold," a "Starbuck's model" for journalism is needed. That model entails "assigning semi-professional journalists to supply a multitude of content that is much more niche than anything professional content companies could possibly imagine."
Previous:AOL plans to rely on a combination of the know-how of the more than 500 full-time journalists it has thus far hired, the contributions of its freelancers, and "judicious" use of Web-analytics software to build a high-tech newsroom in its Manhattan headquarters located in Manhattan's Cooper Square neighborhood.
The software employed by the company determines which articles need to be written by its journalists based on what topics are "hot on the Web, based on activity on such sites as Google and Facebook," and gives its journalists up-to-the minute data on how much traffic those articles generate.
Its Seed service, which we have written about previously, pays its freelance contributors to write on subjects in demand.
Previous:AOL owned hyperlocal news site Patch.com is planing to expand and open more community news blogs. Patch currently has 33 sites for towns in the New York metro area., but according to the company, they expect to grow into "hundreds" by the end of 2010.
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Jeff Reynar has been hired as aol.'s new head of technology for engineering and products and will be responsible for the management of aol.'s New York Technology center where he will work on developments for the company's content business.
Reynar previously worked at Google and Microsoft; he co-founded DBT Labs.
Previous:Recently on Poynter.org Joe Strupp, the editor of hyperlocal Web site Maplewoodian.com, wrote a comprehensive post about the hyperlocal news invasion of his town in Northern New Jersey. The focus of the article is the success of Patch.com, which is expanding to cover towns in Connecticut and New York that either do not have a local paper or are ignored by most regional papers.
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Collen Curtis, AOL's editorial director of women's and lifestyle programming, is launching a new AOL food site in February and has looked to the former editorial staff of Gourmet magazine to write for it. According to an article in the New York Post, Curits is hiring about dozen editors from the magazine including Cheryl Brown, who will be editor of the new site.
Gourmet magazine ceased operations in November of 2009. February
aol.'s recently launched content platform Seed.com is already getting negative feedback from writers. eConsultancy reports that writers who submit articles to its platform are not getting timely acceptances or rejections for their work. The Seed.com Publishing Agreement says that all articles will be approved or rejected within five business days of the assignment due date.
Previous:Mobile analytics company Flurry announced today that it has raised $7 million in Series B round funding from several VC firms, including New York based Union Square Ventures and First Round Capital, which is opening an office in the city.
The funding round comes not long after the company merged with New York based competitor Pinch Media in December.
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David A. Singer, a NY-based lawyer discusses in a recent op-ed for The Huffington Post how hyperlocal news site Patch recently launched several new sites for towns in Westchester County. In his examination as to whether or not Patch will fill the local news void that is missing from the county, he also notes the current state of the news outlets in Westchester, finding that The Journal News local news coverage has been "decimated" and that Patch has some hyperlocal competition with Larchmont Gazette, www.myrye.com, and www.crotonblog.com.
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