Newsbobber is headed to Minnesota Public Radio. I've taken a job with MPR and Newsbobber is part of the deal.
So Newsbobber will not survive in its current form. Instead, elements of Newsbobber -- and certainly some of the ideas behind it -- will become part of MPR's Minnesota Today, a new web venture and content-sharing project.
My job will be to help create, launch and run Minnesota Today. I'll be focused on the web side of the project, trying to build a robust and engaging hub for Minnesota news, culture and buzz.
Minnesota Today also includes a plan to share content among MPR and other media outlets, including newspapers. MPR hired David Cazares, a veteran newspaper journalist most recently with the South Florida Sun Sentinel, to lead that part of the project.
I get started Nov. 9 at MPR. The goal is to launch Minnesota Today by Jan. 1.
Newsbobber has been a great learning experience. When I started building it, I knew next to nothing about web design and absolutely nothing about coding. I just had a strong belief that a locally curated Minnesota news site was a good idea. Now that Newsbobber has been up and running for awhile, I'm even more sold on the value of pulling together major media, independent sources, blogs, Twitter and whatever else is out there.
Aggregating the news is nothing new, of course, and plenty of players are doing it on a large scale ... and bringing it down to a local level. But I don't believe the automated national aggregators that try to serve a local audience have truly nailed it. They do a good job serving latest headlines from major media outlets, but largely ignore indy media and blogs. They also have trouble identifying quirky local stories or sometimes even the biggest story of the day. (Compare the Twin Cities efforts of Outside.In, Topix, Yahoo and Google). The problem for the national players of course is that adding a human touch to every market (editors who pick top stories, for example) would shatter the business model. Human curation is expensive and doesn't scale easily.
But it's coming. Examiner.com features locally produced content, news headlines and events. Huffington Post and ESPN are moving into the local space, and in fact have joined forces in Chicago to create a mix of news, sports, blogs and chat that aims to snare a sizable share of the metro market. UPDATE 10/29: Another local effort to watch will be Allbritton's plans for a Washington DC local site that will merge two TV station sites and employ about 50 journalists and web producers.
The market for a Minnesota news hub remains fairly open, though some intriguing efforts are getting underway. BringMeTheNews is a Twin Cities news site that combines news aggregation and original content. WCCO aims to launch The Wire, a service that aims to combine reader input and staff reporting in a free-flowing river of news and information.
It's an exciting and competitive time. I'm now biased, of course, but I think MPR is making a smart play with Minnesota Today. I'm eager to get started.
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