Outside.in, a major aggregator of local blogs, has begun the integration with CNN that was announced last December at our Interactive Local Media Conference in LA. First up is integration with CNN’s home page, weather page and profile page. On the homepage, users can click on Local Weather & News in the right sidebar, enter their zip code and get local news. On the weather page, headlines appear below the map when zip codes are entered. On the profile page, “local news” appears on the right.
Outside.in emphasizes that this is just the beginning of a broad integration, and will position the company for integration with any site. “To support the one billion+ monthly page views on CNN.com, our team tackled the challenge of massively scaling our platform and providing CNN with a robust, yet flexible API to meet all their needs. The integration allows us to drive exposure and traffic throughout the news ecosystem to publishers of all sizes,” notes an internal communication.
In other local aggregator news, MSNBC’s Everyblock has teamed with New Haven-based SeeClickFix to enable consumers in each of EveryBlock’s 16 cities to report and view civic issues reported in their neighborhoods (i.e. “Stop sign needed at corner of El Camino Real.”)
The ad-supported site, which emphasizes mobile reporting, has previously teamed with a number of top newspapers, including The New York Times, The Journal Register, Boston.com, North Jersey.com, Philly.com, Dallas Morning News and The New Haven Independent. It follows in the footsteps of E-The-People, a site that had pursued a similar strategy more than ten years ago, working with over 100 newspapers.
“The work that EveryBlock has done to free up local data has been instrumental in creating the kind of environment in which tools like SeeClickFix can thrive and create real positive change through greater civic participation,” said SeeClickFix CEO Ben Berkowitz in a release. “SeeClickFix maintains an open data policy so that like-minded sites like EveryBlock can put our users content in front of their users, and we can work to create a larger environment of open local communication for the greater good of our neighborhoods.”