Mark posited that with 40MM monthly pageviews, and $560k of revenue (half is which is from a network of blogs or some Outside.in like stuff, not part of the core site), a reasonably sized city paper could afford a staff of around 20 people.

Two problems.

Only a handful of newspapers have the 40MM pageviews. like less than 20.

And, next, you are estimating a $7.00 eCPM sitewide, and a pretty healthy eCPm for your 3rd party network revenue. Now, I'm rooting for those guys at Outside.in to deliver on this kind of revenue, but we have used every single ad network on the web here at Topix, and let me tell you, getting $7.00 sitewide eCPM on news is really really tough.

So, what's the solutuion? Personally, after talking to Tim Redmond at the Bay Guardian and Billy Jensen at Village Voice Media, I think the alt weeklies have a pretty good balance of print and online and a sales effort that makes sense for a locality, and those publications are in fact right in line with the staffing that Mark is talking about, have a good shot at selling lcoal advertising and seem to be doing ok.

But.

There's no way that your typical midtier local newspaper is getting to 40MM monthly pageviews any time soon, and that means a staff of 20 is probably going to be pushing it for a local online only publication.

And I'm not talking about e-commerce (although I'm as big a fan of Zappos as anyone). I'm talking about finding out the best deals on products in my town.

Since Topix has news & community for every city and town in the U.S., it makes a lot of sense for us to partner with services looking to leverage the growing, national footprint of local audiences we've built.

But as with the news we aggregate, it can be a challenge to present these myriad partnerships in a way that's compelling and clear to visitors. In an effort to accomplish that -- for every city in the U.S. no less -- we've built a new shopping page, which gathers together our commercial partnerships in one, handy place.

This example for San Mateo, California, offers electronics and appliances from Krillion.com, clothes and accessories from Nearbynow.com, useful product reviews from Wize.com, yellow page listings, and coupons from local businesses.

Looking for a car, place to live, a pet or a date? This new page also helps visitors find our existing classified partnerships with SimplyHired.com, Cars.com, Apartments.com, Trulia.com, Oodle.com, and Match.com.

Happy shopping.

But this press release caught my eye today, when it came in on the fax:

Staunton, IL is proud to host the 21st Annual Tour de Donut and 4th Annual Rib Cook-off on Saturday, July 11, 2009. The Tour de Donut is a unique bike race, in which you can eat donuts at the designated stops in order to reduce your race time. Last year, more than 850 riders participated in the race. Registration for the race is now open. In conjunction with the race, a Rib Cook-off will be occurring in which food will be served starting at 9am, with the ribs being served at 5pm. Entertainment will be provided by Five and Dimers, The Wherehouse Project, and Gumbohead. For more information visit, bebikeclub.com or stauntonil.com.

Sounds like the Bay to Breakers in SF has some competition for wacky.

Many thanks to the Topix community and CNET Webware editors for voting Topix a Webware 100 Winner in the Location-Based Services category.

The 2009 Webware 100 Awards recognize the best Web 2.0 sites, services, and applications that are leading the next wave of innovation. Webware editors received and reviewed thousands of entries. Then, the Web 2.0 user community cast more than 630,000 votes in an online voting poll which ultimately selected the winners.

“This annual listing has become such an essential resource for people who want to learn more about Web 2.0 and the many ways it can help them stay connected,” said Rafe Needleman, editor at Webware and CNET. “The Web 2.0 community and our editors ultimately selected the very best sites, services and applications that have made a lasting impression.”

The Webware editors had some kind words for Topix, specifically, "It's an ever-swirling page of news that's updated at all hours, and on all topics."

We're proud of the recognition from the CNET Webware editors, and the support from our community. You can join in on the news and community in your own town today.

For what Ms. Heffernan really shines light on is the way that journalists at publications see comments, commentary and commenters.

"Most journalists hate to read it, because it’s stinging and distracting, and readers rarely plow through long comments sections unless they intend to post something themselves."

I'll skip the knock about unsubstatiated generalizations, since I think she's right -- print and old school journalists do hate commentary. And I will give a shout out to MS. Hefferman here for what opened that paragraph:

"Someone should be paying more attention, especially since online newspaper commenters as a whole seem to have (at least) the stamina, drive and spare time to become a cogent part of online journalism."

Well, they are. Michael Arrington of Techcrunch regularly responds in the comments of his news site. And if you were following what the AP was up to, the comments were where it was at for that story, with Jim Kennedy and Arrington mixing it up. And, here at Topix, we're powering through the lack of local reporting by enabling the people to power that news themselves through commentary in over 20,000 cities and towns.

What she's missing here, and what informs the relationship here around journalists and commentary is that commentary makes the story secondary. In commentary, the original article becomes the seed of a conversation or discussion. And, the commentary is not merely some sort of add on to the article, but the main point of the exercise.

The Internet is not, at the end of the day, a distribution vehicle for your content. The Internet is a place for people to interact and participate with your content, add to it, and make something new. The people transform what they get to touch.

The article describes some of the more common behaviors in online commnetary -- the back and forth between commenters, and the observations that most commentary is written for the commenter themselves. If the article had enabled commentary, I would have perhaps pointed out that the Internet does not have "signature 'fact-checking'", or rather, it's called fisking

Perhaps more telling is her point that the fact checking "rarely potent enough to compel corrections by The Post". Maybe it's because the comments are petty and banal. Or maybe the Post (and other publications) aren't really involved or paying attention. Or both.

. And maybe nothing can — or even should — be done to curb entirely the brute urge of readers to defy what they’ve read.

Despite Ms. Heffernan's clear bias here, she gets a lot of it right, and if you care about the future of what news looks like, and why journalists and journalism will fight that future into bankruptcy, this is a great piece.

News Site        Unique Visitors (000)

NYTimes.com                      10,942
Topix.com                          6,495
USA Today Sites                   5,960
WashingtonPost.com          5,829
LATimes.com                        5,173

Source: comScore, Media Metrix, March 2009

The folks I’ve worked with over the past four years are smart, savvy and realize where they stand. They wanted to make sure they had a stake in a news aggregator with Google having just launched Google news. A little while into their investment, we told them that news aggregation was a great start to a business, but it wasn’t very interesting, from either a traffic or a revenue standpoint. And that doubling down on hyper local news – especially where there currently wasn’t any – was the strategy we were going to pursue.

As Robert Scoble points out in his recent post, Topix and our pursuit of a model to deal with hyperlocal news, is one of the online efforts our newspaper investors have a stake in, and also that local is a pretty major part of the future of the news busienss

While we started out as a broad-based news aggregator, we noticed that what people wanted most was news about their town. So, we moved to augment our news with comments and stories from our visitors. And today it’s great to see that our strategy has paid traffic dividends, and being the #1 site with respect to unique visitors with company like the Miami Herald, Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times and USA TODAY is something we’re pretty proud of here at Topix.

There has been a lot of hue and cry about decisions made by the newspaper companies. Looking at the moves made by Gannett, Tribune and Knight Ridder (acquired by McClatchy), it is not like they did nothing. They created the #1 job site online, Careerbuilder, some of the largest classified sites online (cars.com. apartments.com, homegain, and the #1 local news site online – Topix). Despite what journalists think, with the decoupling of classified revenues, there is going to be a huge restructuring in the news business, and it’s going to be bloody. There’s really nothing that would have prevented most of what’s happening here.

Over the past four years, we have grown Topix with its roots in aggregation technology, to the place where people discuss the news and issues important to where the live and work. Embracing audience participation is for us the critical engine for content creation and traffic growth.

Local news is not a search problem, it’s a community opportunity.

There’s still a lot of work to do here, but it feels good to tell my board that we are their #1 most visited site.

Here's a video from Jolie O'Dell who's reporting for Brian Solis' Bub.licio.us where I talk to Jolie about Topix and what's going on in the local space...

And, to top it all off, Rich Skrenta (co-founder of Topix, amongst other things) put out possibly the best analogy ever on the newspaper business and its relationship to the net with his post "The news medium has a message: 'Goodbye' ".

Wow.

While seeing all of this, all on the same day might make you think that there's some sort of new insight emerging here. However, if you look closely at Steven's points -- he references the William Gibson quote in his talk "the future is already here, it is just unevenly distributed -- technology and political news have already gone thorugh much of this shift, and the news in those areas is actually much richer and fuller than it was back in the days of paper.

Also, Rich's post is pretty much a summary of the pitch we made to the newspaper comapnies that invested in us.

So, there's nothing new here, really, accept the fact that the journalists and pundits are finally conceding the truth of what's going to happen:

The business model for the American newspaper daily is gone, and is never, ever, coming back..

So can we now please stop trying to put Humpty Dumpty back together again?

It's going to be ok.

Steven demonstrates that, for tech reporting, the future is already here -- and Rich has been to its office. (And, coincidentally, both of those guys put their money where their mouth is, having founded companies based on that future with Outside.in and Topix)

I am going to be moderating a panel at SXSW Interactive this year, User Generated Content: State of the Union - thanks to the invitation of Dean McCall, the founder of IdeaGin, and it would be great to see anyone interested in what has been going on in the various spaces where social software has taken off.

Wouild be happy to talk to folks before or afterwards...

We'll be taking a look at successes, business models and what's going on in this space with a couple of folks

User Generated Content: State of the Union

Room C
Friday, March 13th
2:00 pm - 3:00 pm

It's been a few years since YouTube and Flickr have dropped on the scene. Now almost everyone you know is creating content and posting it online. With the idea of User Generated Content now proven and the infrastructure in place where are we today? The same old questions keep popping up. "Where do you make money?" "How do you stand out?" and "Where do you find the time?" The panel will take a look at these questions and others as we explore the ever changing landscape of User Generated Content. This panel is sponsored by Ideagin.com

Moderator: Chris Tolles CEO, Topix

Dean Mccall Founder, IdeaGin

Stephen Newman Chief Exec Officer, Mouth Watering Media

Todd Morrey Mosso: The Rackspace Cloud

Wes Wilson Pres, IncSpring

Chris Tolles CEO Topix

I thought it was a pretty good example of people speaking for their constituencies on the panel. I got accused by Hashem Bajwa of sounding like "old media" for my insistence that publishers need to be a paid part of the ecosystem, and he was asked, somewhat pointedly, by an IDG exec about why agencies were asking publishers for creativity.

(The example case here was Burger King "sacrifice a friend for a whopper" campaign, which was brash and brilliant. My point was the owners of the traffic, be it google, facebook, myspace etc should charge, and I quote, "bank" to work with brands, and that these "viral" campaigns were often on proprietary networks).

I n any case, the folks at Fora.tv seemed to like what I had to say, given that the highlights were all centered aroud three of the different examples I posited -- opportunities from customer compliants, how news online is about participation instead of merely consumption and how oversharing actually has an economic value...

(cover photo here was selcted by them but I believe was taken by Robert Scoble)

So, I took on the pro-print side of the question (to some degree, just to be perverse). Of course I covered myself with caveats, and evidently, so did Jeff Jarvis, in the other side - "disappearing ink". So much so that the editor informed each of us (with a sigh I could hear over email) that we agreed too much to be interesting.

So we both squawked and put back the important points into our respective pieces, and I kind of like the result.

I do kind of miss the days when people like me (or Jeff) were out in left field and saying the obvious thing would find a raft of C level execs from big media touting the conventional wisdom. I can imagine this one was going to be a tough one to find someone who was going to play it completely safe. Jeff's a hack and is more critical of his tribe, I'm a flack, and happier to see media paying attention to things I care about (Thanks, Buisnessweek!)

I really do believe that smart publishers will figure out how to leverage their print products (full disclosure: I'm an online apostate and subscribe to the print SF Chronicle and the Sunday NY Times). The distribution opportunities should be too rich to ignore. But I also think it's going to be rarer and more commercial.

As an online guy, I will be somewhat gleeful in the ascension of online over print, mind you, and as I (tried) to say on the Businessweek piece, my team *does* win.

Maybe it's all going to work out OK afterall

I've written before about PubCon, and why its different than most of the trade shows I speak at or attend. Small businesses and site owners making there way, and folks outside of the echo chamber of Silicon Valley. And to be fully disclosed, I'm on the PubCon advisory board.

And the news from here is good.

First, I have it on good authority that attendance is up for the show. More interestingly, while attendance evidently *did* take a big pause right as things melted down with the banks and the Dow, about three weeks ago, signups came rocketing in, and things are ahead of last year, based on recent decision making by the audience of webmasters and business people who see the web as core to their business.

That's right. Small businesses made the call to invest in their businesses by coming here. The people here are still working the land, and making it happen

I'm not hearing doom and gloom. People are being a little cautious, to be clear. Sergio Kajirian, the Executive Director from PEK interactive told me "We're seeing lots of business right now, but people have flipped from asking us to make them money to how we can save them money".

Still, people are excited and paying attention in the panels, working to make their business work on the web. They are not drowning their sorrows at the bar, they're working hard, head's down.

And they seem kinda confident.

Now, maybe all that talk of impending doom is going to hit all these folks in the side of the head. And lots of my peers at Web 2.0 last week seemed pretty confident things were going to get pretty bad pretty quick for a pretty long time.

But.

The folks who came here, on their own dime, to figure out better ways to grow (or at least maintain their businesses), hey, they're carrying our water, guys.

It's too early to tell how things are going to shake out, but Pubcon was a counterbalance to a lot of the negative stuff I've been hearing for the past month or so.

Here's an example of the map for San Francisco, CA:

In the legend above the map, you can specify which item you want to focus the map on (News only, Events only, etc.), or you can show all items at once. Each item on the map also links to more information.

Look for more additions to the maps in the coming weeks. In the meantime, drop us a line and let us know what you think.

Here's what one of the judges had to say about us, "Interesting site with a healthy amount of user generated content. Excellent and interesting cross navigation to engage the user further."