When The McClatchy Co. recently bought Knight Ridder Inc., it got a lot more than a collection of print newspapers. Knight Ridder had full or partial ownership of several prominent online properties, such as Real Cities, Topix, CareerBuilder, and ShopLocal.
So what do they plan to do with all do with all those properties? On March 21, Chris Hendricks (McClatchy’s vice president, interactive media) told Digital Edge (an online publication of the Newspaper Association of America’s New Media Federation) that the company does not intend to disband the Real Cities ad network. “We’re bullish on Real Cities,” he said. “We’ll focus on growing that network to more sites. Three hundred or 400 sites would be much more of an eye-catcher to the [advertising] marketplace.”
Topix, however, might want to sharpen its mission and goals. Said Hendricks, “We like what we see in Topix, but we have to understand it better.”
I’d agree — Topix’s current direction and differentiation seem unclear to me. Their own overview says, “With thousands of news sources continually releasing stories 24 hours a day, finding relevant news can often be a time-consuming task. For complete coverage, users are forced to visit many different sites and sift through a variety of stories that may or may not be relevant to them. Topix.net alleviates this problem by creating thousands of topically driven, specific news Web pages and populating each of those pages with only news about that particular topic.”
And how is that supposed to make Topix more valuable than, say, Google News? I mean, the comment function is cool, but I just don’t think that’s enough. (Thanks to Katja Riefler for the tip. For more about McClatchy’s online operations and strategies, see this March 14 Poynter Online article by Bill Mitchell.)
