MediaNews’ 61 newspapers have inked a deal with news aggregator Topix.com to provide story commenting and forums. “The goal at Topix is to power local voice and conversation in every single city and town across America,” said Chris Tolles, Topix CEO. “By partnering with newspaper companies like MediaNews Group, we accelerate fulfillment of that mission through a federated, networked commenting system which provides synergies between every partner in the network. We plan to actively expand partnerships in 2008.” You can see an example of how the commenting works on this KOB.com story. When you read or post a comment, your enter a Topix-hosted forum inside the media partner’s navigation and branding. Press release…
Update: Howard Owens makes an interesting point. “Newspapers should not outsource its community relationship,” he writes. “Letting another company own that relationship is a strategic mistake of monumental proportions.”
PRESS RELEASE — PALO ALTO, Calif., Nov. 27 /PRNewswire/ — Topix (http://www.topix.com), the largest news community on the Web, today announced an agreement to become the preferred online forums and article commenting provider for MediaNews Group, publisher of 61 daily newspapers, including the Denver Post and San Jose Mercury News. In addition, Topix has signed forums partnerships with GoErie.com, Zap2It.com, KOB.com, and CapitalTimes.com.
MediaNews Group has already launched forums on several newspaper sites in New England, including LowellSun.com, SentinelandEnterprise.com, ConnecticutPost.com, and NewsTimes.com. Within the next few weeks, Topix plans to launch an additional 30-40 MediaNews Group sites that don’t currently have a commenting system or that are migrating from another platform. The Topix forums are designed for simple integration, and the migration of the MediaNews Group sites is expected to be complete by early 2008.
“The goal at Topix is to power local voice and conversation in every single city and town across America,” said Chris Tolles, Topix CEO. “By partnering with newspaper companies like MediaNews Group, we accelerate fulfillment of that mission through a federated, networked commenting system which provides synergies between every partner in the network. We plan to actively expand partnerships in 2008.”
Topix has built the only web-scalable forum platform, which balances algorithmic and human moderation — as well as speed and stability — to provide hyper-local participation on a nationwide network of sites. Topix partners are successfully building engaged audiences: IndyStar.com and Sun-Sentinel.com, for example, have each surpassed one million forum posts. Since the Topix forums launched less than two years ago, more than three million people have posted more than 18 million comments on the site — with participation at 80,000 comments a day.