Amplifying Specialized News Services to our Local Readers

One of the roles The BreakingNews Network is to be a clearing house for news services that need to reach local audiences.

Local news isn’t just reported by the local press. For example, compelling local stories appear in news services like The Atlantic Cities, Colorlines, Public News Service and Investigative News Network that are intended for their national readers — but may not reach the local readership where it has the most immediate impact. By necessity, news services need to cater and appeal to the broader national readership in order to achieve the traffic required for monetization. The hurdle is developing and maintaining the syndication channels that get investigative news reports in Cincinnati, Ohio to Cincinnati readers. I’m betting very few consumers recognize the networks named above, one reason is simply their brands are not distributed to local levels. Kevin Davis, CEO of Investigative News Network notes: “The new investigative news publishers, many of whom are nonprofit and in our network, need to be exposed to target and local readers across a variety of platforms. We work together with them to make sure their content is not siloed, but networked broadly across various channels that provide the consumer multiple opportunities to be informed. This is especially applicable for publishers reporting on diversity issues and underserved communities.”

(Above paragraph an excerpt from my article In the Era of Networked Journalism, Everybody can Contribute on Street Fight.)

We’ve been working together with The Media Consortium,  Investigative News Network, and Alt Weeklies with 63, 83 and 117 news services respectively, to amplify their news services’ stories down to the local level. Most news happens at a location. The Breaking News Network’s networked journalism mission is to simply make sure that news is delivered to those who can best use or appreciate it based on locality.

Related: The Breaking News Network supports Public Interest News Syndication