Word: localized
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...bringing any insight (a description, it should be noted, that can be just as fairly applied to many offerings of more mainstream media). Most Examiners are not journalists, and their prose is not edited. CEO Rick Blair, who helped launch AOL's Digital Cities, an earlier attempt at a local-news network, calls them "pro-am" - more professional than bloggers, but more amateur than most reporters. You might also call them traffic hounds: because their remuneration is set by, among other things, the number of people who click on their stories, Examiners will often piggyback on hot news...
Examiner.com is not alone in gathering an army of writers to create a hyper-local network for the Web. Social-networking site Gather.com works in a similar fashion, as does Prime Writer News Network and Associated Content. Each revenue model is a little different, but they all rely on the willingness of people to write for love. Shelley Frost, the San Francisco dogs Examiner, posts about three times a week. She estimates that she makes a dollar a day out of her writing, and $50 each time she recruits a new Examiner. "I do it to build relationships with other...
...goal of all these companies, eventually, is to snare local advertising, a $141 billion market that, according to Blair, has been left largely untapped by the Internet. Examiner.com will start rolling out ad packages in the next few months, and will hit up its network for leads...
...meantime, these pro-am armies are giving the big media companies plenty to worry about. The mainstream media's news-harvesting machines are no match for a swarm of local locusts buzzing over the same crop. And Big Media is starting to take notice. CNN, which already uses a lot of crowdsourced material with its ireport arm, just invested in another local outfit, outside.in. Perhaps the news giant figures that if everybody's going to be a reporter, they might as well work...
...lack of will. Jump-starting activity on Harvard’s vacant and under-utilized property in Allston and Brighton doesn’t require a delegation visiting for several days like the one that President Faust just led to South Africa in November. With Harvard’s local Allston/Brighton opportunity, a combination of Rappaport Institute conferences, seed grants to interested individuals and organizations, business plan contests, and an open invitation from the administration to welcome and consider good ideas could be enough to get the ball rolling...