Lost Remote » KING TV’s CitizenRain.com adds news aggregation

KING TV’s CitizenRain.com adds news aggregation

Cory Bergman September 20th, 2007

Yeah, yeah, I’m back to promoting myself, but this is pretty cool. Our blog aggregator, CitizenRain.com, has expanded to add local news aggregation. At the top of the site, we post links to the most interesting stories we can find from all of the Seattle news sites, TV competitors included. As you can see, we’re not necessarily picking the big stories of the day but the most interesting, clickable stories.

Then we still have our own blog, the blog aggregator divided by topic and our Seattle blog search tool. So in a nutshell, we serve up the day’s most interesting links from 236 Seattle community blogs and the news media all in one place.

As far as I know, we’re the only local media company with an aggregation site, and for some reason I find it very entertaining to link the competition.

9 Comments Add your own

1. Mike Escutia | September 20th, 2007 at 11:02 am

I like it.

What’s with the generic-looking “sky and clouds” background, though? I would think a good shot of the Seattle skyline would be more appropriate. Maybe you could have rotating header images using photos of different parts of the city.

(Oh, and this New Hampshire resident really wants to visit Seattle someday. )
2. Mike Escutia | September 20th, 2007 at 11:02 am

D’oh! I just checked out a few other pages of the site and can see that you’re way ahead of me. Sorry about that!
3. Safran | September 20th, 2007 at 1:19 pm

I know I’ve told you this - but I want to share the thought with the LR crowd…

Can you imagine presenting this idea at most stations? “Yeah - we’re gonna have a site and we’re going to put the competitors’ headlines on it. Also, it won’t have our station’s name on it.”

Well done, Cory.
4. discreet_chaos | September 20th, 2007 at 3:09 pm

I agree with Safran that it’s a good site, but if I may follow-up on something else that he’s said; To me, the difference is that KING-5 maintains their own web identity, with their own news and Citizen Rain appears to be an additional product that could actually be spun-off, if the traffic and revenues would justify such a move.

BTW - Cory: For some reason, whenever I see “Citizen Rain”, lately I’ve wanted to say “Chocolate”
5. Rob | September 20th, 2007 at 3:09 pm

Hey Cory … actually you’re second.

We launched local news aggregation here in Spokane shortly after NAB this spring.

Follow the URL in my name to our Spokane and Eastern Washington News page on KXLY.com where we link to our competitors’ headlines.

Of course, not as dynamic as what your team has built at KING5, but the important thing is that more people are getting the idea that in order to beat the competition you have to embrace the competition.
6. Cory | September 20th, 2007 at 3:38 pm

Rob, I adjusted the link to say first “site.”

And notice that nowhere on CitizenRain does KING get preferential treatment.

Save for the ads, of course.

And I like the idea of adding aggregation on the core site beneath your branded content.
7. Rob | September 20th, 2007 at 4:14 pm

No worries m8.

I agree wholeheartedly about aggregating content no matter if it’s a blog or a news website … the driving force is to make it easier for a community member to be able to skim all the local headlines regardless of who published those headlines.

The hard sell is to get outside of the news person mentality - ignore the other guy’s website, play down the other guy’s content - and think like a community member and embrace the other guy’s website and content.
8. Jim Ogle | September 21st, 2007 at 1:17 pm

Wow! I love this!

The frustration I have is trying to replicate the kind of effort you have represented here. While I have NO problem in putting other sources stories on a site (I’d like to have them in the body of our similar stories— much like the BBC does), I cannot figure out a way that isn’t so people-intensive.

Any suggestions for those of us with fewer resources than you?

Jim
9. Rob | September 21st, 2007 at 1:39 pm

Jim,

I’m part of a pretty small team (two full-time) in my shop and we’ve found a couple easy ways to do this. First, collect RSS feeds from your news competition (TV, newspapers) and local bloggers.

Second, there are some really inexpensive (some are free) and easy to use systems to aggregate this kind of content. I’d suggest Blog Rolling dotcom to create customized blogrolls of people who are blogging in your area. There’s another program called Feed Digest where you can build customized RSS feeds of whatever you want … local news feeds, blog feeds, et cetera. Once your blog rolls and blog feeds are built you’re ready to add the content to your site. The most labor intensive part of the whole process really is hunting down all of those RSS feeds.

Good luck!