In another sign the mainstream media finally gets the link economy, the Sacramento Bee unveiled a new hyperlocal aggregation site last week.
“From my view, Sacramento Connect is a contemporary way to carry out some familiar aims of a newspaper: Pointing readers to interesting and useful information and connecting people to community life,” Bee Editor Melanie Sill wrote in a note to readers.
The site is not overly designed; it appears to be a simple WordPress implementation with the SacBee’s navigation running in the top header. A toolbar at the bottom of the screen is intended to make it easy for visitors to share the content to social networks. (The toolbar is also present on all SacBee pages.)
The headlines running down the middle of the page are from a limited number of “partners” and don’t include any from the Sacramento Press. Sill wrote that the plan is start small with less than 2 dozen sources and build from there. “These sites are both competitors and friends, and from our experience mostly the latter,” Sill wrote.
“I’m really happy to see The Bee step up with Connect,” Sacramento Press COO Ben Ilfeld told me via email. “There are some things that need the leadership of powerful brands and strong news organizations: Quality aggregation is one.”
SacPress launched the Sacramento Local Online Adverting Network (SLOAN) earlier this year so may be seen as more of a competitor than a friend to the Bee.
“We were approached early in the development of Connect but not since,” Ilfeld said. “With SLOAN we are building a part of the infrastructure that sustains and grows a healthy local media ecosystem. Sacramento Connect is another key for many local media sites. In fact there is a ton of crossover of publishers who are members of both. Connect brings more traffic and brand recognition (in theory at least), and SLOAN brings money based on that traffic. It’s truly a win-win.”
Michele McLellan writes that the Connect project spun out of a 2009 class at the Knight Digital Media Center on social media strategy for news organizations. The site will compete with NCvoices.us, another aggregator of local news (that takes a very craigslist approach to design and layout).
So, if you haven’t already, add Sacramento to the growing list of evolving local news ecosystems to keep an eye on. We expect some interesting findings to emerge from California’s capital city.