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Companies have been trying to crack the local news
puzzle for years now and we're not talking about little
internet start-ups...big companies like Yahoo and
Google. Needless to say, the latest variant of internet
giants via social media also have plans on how to put
those pieces together in their future aspirations to be
everything to everyone. No one's quite figured it out
and we're not claiming the role of giant slayer but we
thing there's a way to at least put together the outside
pieces of that puzzle. Always start with the outside
pieces, right?
You
might not be too different from me in you daily
information update online. Let me walk you through how
I get my daily dose. Yahoo is my home page only because
it has been over 10 years now. I've changed browsers,
email hosts, and the like but I just don't really want
to change my home page and maybe that's because it does
pretty much everything I want. I already have Google
for my search bar so I'm good there. When I pull up the
screen everyday, I get the general blocks of things I'm
interested. There's the general headlines,
international news, internet news, music news, and the
like. Yahoo let's you add modules by category which I
did about 5 years ago and for the most part, they fit
the bill....enough to where I don't feel like changing.
There's something missing though and maybe Yahoo has a
module that I haven't added but it's the local news.
Yahoo has been trying to become the local information
hub for years now. You can see in rows into this space
with some of their local reviews for restaurants, etc
which I will stumble upon but it has become integral to
how I use Yahoo. Google also will test local results in
their searches and then pull it but it's never felt like
an integral part of their offering. I could always go
to our local newspaper and although I will end up there
now and then, I don't seem to back for months at a
time. Yahoo has tried partnering with local newspaper
online content as well but if I won't go back to the
actual newspapers online content (as can probably be
echoed by online newspaper's data everywhere except for
maybe LA and New York), why would I want it through
Yahoo.
You
could argue that this is just due to my specific
preferences and quirks and I might agree with you except
for one thing. The newspapers online aren't attracting
viewers and the big boys (Googles and Yahoos of the
world) aren't building the local content into the
offering more aggressively or integrally. This leads me
to believe that indeed, most of you are like me. This
isn't to say that I don't want local content. I just
haven't found the right venue for it through a
browser...online. Part of this is the inability to find
the local news that I'm interested in and part of it is
a general bottleneck and lack of freshness of the
content provided. I might want to know who won that
local high school game last night but I would rather
know it last night than today. I'm on to other things.
The old method of delivering local news feels stale and
selective (by someone else who has different interests
than I do). Bring in the Zipper ap.
First of all, it's immediate. When news happens and
gets uploaded from someone else, it's available right
away. It's interactive. I can comment, annotate,
confirm or deny information right away. I can even add
my 2 cents which makes the local news thread come to
life. It evolves and I'm adding a little snippet of
DNA. It's on my phone which I'm on all day (and night)
long. I don't need a browser and I don't have to wait.
This day and age, to ask anything more than this seems
ridiculous or at best antiquated. The Zipper app will
go through its own evolution as people require and
create new uses but we might have just pieced together
the border pieces of the local news puzzle. Now, for
the tricky stuff in the middle. |
