The Local Focus
Did you know that Topix has a news page for every zip code? It’s true…we do. I’m sure you all know what local focus means, right? Of course you do! Well, we want to let you know what it means here at Topix.
Keeping it local gives your town one central resource for news. Pulling stories from a variety of sources – the Topix wire, your local paper, community newsletters or blogs, or by writing your own news - you are giving your readers what they are missing when they get their news exclusively from bigger media. We are all interested in what is going on at a state and national level and, at Topix; we have dedicated new pages for those too. If you see a story that is relevant to one of those less granular news pages, post it as a tip, or better yet, apply to edit that page as well!
In smaller towns, the challenge in keeping your local page local can be finding enough news to keep your page updated and fresh. Have no fear; there are creative ways to find local news. Check out these tips!
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Comments (3)
On September 27, 2007 7:27 AM, pragmatist said:
All well and good; however, recently the forum for our community (town of 100,000 people) doubled in number of threads overnight and I noticed that most of these have nothing to do with our town (Flower Mound, TX). Instead, they are about towns within about a 30-mile radius.
Why was this done and how can we keep our forum page dedicated to topics and posts from our local users?
On January 7, 2008 3:14 PM, DZeanwick said:
I am unable to find an answer to some nagging questions I have about Topix. Topix has four tabs: News, Wire, Forums & Polls, and Classifieds. I understand how each tab is generated, except for the Wire tab. What sources are used to generate the information that is shown on the Wire tab?
In your blog, you mention that Topix pulls "stories from a variety of sources – the Topix wire, your local paper, community newsletters or blogs, or by writing your own news . . ." but how does the "Topix wire," specifically, get generated?
On January 9, 2008 1:14 PM, Emily said:
@dzeanwick The Topix wire is kind of the magic behind Topix itself. We send our robots out to crawl about 60 thousand different news sources and grab all the stories we find and set our algorythms loose on them. The stories are then classified across about 400 thousand different news pages based on the content of the articles.
The "wire" for each of those newspages contains all of the content our system has determined is relevant to that particular page. Robots are awesome, but not perfect, so there are sometimes some things that look like they belong there if you are a robot, not as a human being. As a human editor you can distinguish the hits and misses.