Topix.net, an online news aggregator, just received $15M in additional investment from three newspaper groups (Gannett, Tribune, McClatchy.)
It’s good to see the shift in focus coming back to news. I always thought papers spent too much attention securing classified advertising and not enough securing news readership.
It’s no stretch to assume that the rise of the blog is acting as the primary catalyst for the shift. In the 90’s it was monster, ebay and realtor.com sparking the Classified Ventures investments.
[…] Earlier this month Gannett, Tribune, and McClatchy (which recently absorbed Knight Ridder properties) made news for their investment into topix.net, an online news aggregator. Gannett also announced a community publishing initiative to leverage crowd sourcing. […]
[…] So why the rant? I’m intrigued by the number of newspaper vs. blog comments stemming from the recent newspaper initiative announcements. Marshall Kirkpatrick commented on the local blogging networks serving as incredible competition to newspapers (my emphasis) in a recent post regarding the Yahoo! / newspaper deal. I think I even made a fuzzy, but similar, comment in one of my own posts. […]
[…] Ironically, I am finding topix.net to be a pretty solid resource for finding additional coverage of the story by local and national, old (television) and new media (blogs.) You may or may not remember that Gannett (Argus Leader’s parent company) is a major stakeholder in the online news aggregator. […]