I’ve been looking at Outside.in's new Radar non-cellular Website, which offers hyperlocal news with a twist. You’ll receive news occurring first within 1,000 feet of your location and expanding outside to news of your neighborhood and then your city and state.
You may set filtering keywords for specific news. For example: The coffee shop across the street, the apartment complex a few blocks away, the shopping center across town, or the club in the next city.
Radar doesn't yet have a cellular-centric site. But CEO Mark Josephson wrote me that it's slated for this summer. If Radar is like many mobile-oriented companies, it will offer an iPhone-specific site as well as a generic site accessible from any phone.
Mobility is a big part of the company’s strategy, and it’s a no-brainer. Receiving hyperlocal news as you’re wandering around is useful. I’d also like to get alerts.
The downside: If you live in Dullsville, you might not get much local news.
Interesting fact: Steven Berlin Johnson is one of Outside.in’s founders. He established several Websites and is a well known science writer, including a book I really like, The Ghost Map.
As a long-time wireless analyst, a long-time journalist (M.S. in journalism/broadcasting from Northwestern) and a wireless blogger since 2001, I'm very interested in the evolution of the news media, whether it's mainstream journalism, blogging, microblogging, whatever.
The interesting thing is -- where do most bloggers get their material? From the mainstream media that has good writers, good editors and good photographers. Some blogs are indeed excellent (many of which are written by journalists, but certainly not all), but most are awful.
The future of journalism -- and, indeed, the future of information for humans -- is not to discredit or dismiss professional journalism, but to seek a blend of all types of information for different situations.
I assume that outside.in will look at advertising -- perhaps from the local establishments -- for generating revenues. Some newspapers are indeed developing much more local news. Generating revenues for professional publications really is a tough problem.
For the last few years, newspapers were supposed to survive because they "owned" local information. No one could "do local" better than they could, and it was their unique selling proposition. outside.in is not the first locally-focused approach to make newspapers redundant, only the latest. And one of the neatest. Thanks for steering me to it. I seem to be the first member in Santa Fe, but I'm sure I won't be lonely here for long.
It will be interesting to see what the revenue model turns out to be. One thing newspapers still have going for them is their local sales staff, which has relationships with the larger advertisers in town. Not that their product is gaining in popularity, unfortunately.
But I digress. Any idea how they expect to generate revenue?
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previous posts from Alan Reiter's Wireless Web World
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