News aggregator Flipboard ‘s local coverage is ordinarily making what product result in Brian Gottesman described as another “quantum leap, ” improving from 60 topics (a. k. a. cities, villages and communities that you can follow) to more than 1, 000.
While Flipboard has allowed users to follow beliefs focused on major cities like New York for years, it launched a wider initiative around local headlines at the beginning of the year 2010. The company says it’s stage bringing together news coverage located in locations across the United States together with Canada, including all 210 Designated Market Areas tracked by Nielsen.
This comes as local newspapers continue to struggle and shut down, creating what are known as news deserts . But Flipboard’s data quality analyst Marty Rose said that its local news sections don’t just rely on traditional newspapers — they can aggregate stories from travel blogs, publications aimed at diverse audiences, TV stations, regional/national publications that do stories of local interest and more.
“Our aggregation could create a local paper where in communities they don’t exist, ” Gottesman added.
Flipboard is now tying these local topics to GPS locations, as well. Users will be asked to share their location with the app (Gottesman noted that to protect user privacy, Flipboard is only using “coarse precision” and doesn’t retain user location data), then presented with a list of nearby towns and local topics of interest these days follow. This will allow them to continue on everything from local personal news to COVID-19 get the latest, weather forecasts and kitchen recommendations.
“This is such a serious part of informing our anyone, ” Gottesman said. “They need to know if there’s a biological disaster in their area ::. they need to know if there exists a new place to go and get vaccines. Their community is more substantial than ever. ”
Conversely, Rose said that because they build relationships with local news bulletin organizations, Flipboard could also “elevate” their coverage to non-local sections when it might be tightly related to a broader audience.
Asked how publishers’ subscription strategies and paywalls might affect the stories in appear in these local issues, Rose acknowledged, “Some regulatory publications do have paywalls. It’s entirely up to them, offering no problem with that whatsoever 🙁 We provide the headlines assuming the user clicks through and consequently they’re presented with some kind of paywall, it’s unfortunate for them, but nonetheless , it’s not really our make contact with. ”
At precisely the same time, he said that local TELEVISION SET coverage isn’t paywalled, and even a growing number of local blogs and furthermore digital publications are about more of a donation or health club model: “I really i just that they stick around and we may want to push those a bit more. ”
