GetLocalNews.com was one of
the early companies to get into the notion of “citizen journalism.”
Several years before the concept of any and everyone being able to
publish hyper-local news to a news website became popular, GetLocalNews
had set up lots of local cookie-cutter sites (e.g., BeniciaNews.com, BelmontNews.com)
designed to allow people to post their news and share it with their
communities. But the company has yet to get much traction; the “citJ”
spotlight these days shines mostly on competitors.
Word came yesterday from GetLocalNews’ Forrest Canon
that the California-based company is changing its technical and
business model. No details are forthcoming yet, but the change means
that the company no longer needs about 5,000 local news domains that it
holds, so it’s putting them up for sale.
All the domains are in the CityNameNews.com format, such as
CupertinoNews.com and RiversideCountyNews.com. Cities and towns covered
are mostly small or medium sized, all in the U.S. Canon says the
domains will be listed at a domain auction site at the first of the
year (or e-mail him for more information).
The company also has sold its pilot sites in Benicia and Vallejo,
California, as well as its Oregon and Sacramento area networks — which
will continue running as citJ sites under new ownership.
Canon says that GetLocalNews is not dead, and “we are hatching some
interesting new concepts and no longer require a zillion local news
domain names. As you know, we were pioneers in citizen journalism. We
learned a great deal in these past six years about what works and what
doesn’t, and intend to apply this knowledge to the next iteration of
… well, I don’t want to call it citizen journalism, because it will
be similar but not the same.”
