BuzzMachine

Phil Rosenthal from the Chicago Tribune asked me the right question: If you were a newspaper in Chicago, how would you react to the invasion of Arianna (see the post below). My response:

The old way would be to treat her as a competitor and try to do what she does.

The new way would be to find ways to work with her in a network: Sell her local ads and get a piece of her revenue as a result. Take feeds of the good blogs and bloggers she finds and put that in your site, taking the advantage of her curation and relationships. Start lots of blogs that crosspost in her product and yours so you use her to promote those blogs to a new audience. Provide her with feeds of your news so she can deliver it to her audience and you can get links from them to your content. Start to curate blogs on your own and include her in that collection so you can deliver the best of the larger network of local content to your audience. You no longer own the market; you are now part of a larger network and the larger that network is — if you’ve put yourself in the right position — the better it is for you.

Last night at one of the Guardian’s Future of Journalism sessions they are running for staff (and putting online), editor Alan Rusbridger had a conversation with Arianna Huffington and I do believe this is new: Arianna is going local. She’ll devote one editor to curating news and blog posts in the market. Jemima Kiss beat me to blogging this (she must have had less of the red wine at the dinner afterwards). She just added a green section and will launch books, international, and sports soon.

“We are an aspiring newspaper,” she said.

I was just with Emily Bell, head of digital at the Guardian, and she used the right word to describe this: Agile. Arianna and company decide to start taking over the world and they just do it. Big, old newspapers plan and fret instead. Want to offer readers a new area of coverage? Start with one editor, find out what’s available, and get moving. Agile.

Google Maps just added the ability for consumers to add reviews to businesses, on top of the many review sources (such as Yelp) that Google had already licensed. If Google becomes the repository for reviews — because it’s Google — that’s significant competition to local efforts, like the Washington Post’s Local Explorer. I think we’re going to see a lot more use of maps as another entry into information locally. (via Steve Rubel)

Brad Feld invested in Judy’s Book, yet another effort to get people to submit reviews of local merchants and such. Fred Wilson concedes that the same issues folks like me raised with Riffs hold for Judy’s Book. Judy’s Book tries to encourage people to submit reviews by having them earn coffee cards and iPods — paying them, in other words. Paying for contributions is great. But it just indicates that it is otherwise difficult or impossible to get people to contribute content. And I’m not sure this will scale any better than previous efforts have.

I go to the North Jersey page and the questions I see are about earning those spiffs, not about good Mexican restaurants. And even if I did find those reviews, I don’t know who these people are; I don’t know whether to trust their taste. So such efforts have two problems: Getting enough contributions — which is a lot of contributions, since you’ll want to cover most vendors in most areas — and then worrying about the quality (aka trust) of those contributions.

Feld says part of the reason he invested in Judy’s Book is because it comes from Andy Sack, who created the very similar Abuzz, which was a success … well, at least it was for Sack and his investors (including Feld). But Abuzz was bought by the New York Times Company and proceeded to be a bust. There were efforts to get us involved when I was working at Advance and I resisted them all for the same reasons then as I do now:

1. It’s hard to scale local.

2. It’s hard to convince people to contribute content to me when they can now control content on their own.

If, instead, you can find ways to harness (aggregate, link to, make searchable, whatever) the content that people create under their own control and connected with their own identities (aka trust), then I think that will be superior.

There are models for local that may work, just not in a neat, centralized way. Baristanet is one. NashvilleIsTalking is another. Both leave control and content and trust and identity at the edges.

If you can figure out a way to enable that — with search, functionality, ratings of the raters, and revenue — then I think you’ll have a winner. Until then, I will wish luck to Judy’s Book and Riffs and other such services. But I think you’ll be just a centralized waystation on the path to a distributed future. Think edgey.