The Buffalo News has signed on with YourHub.com, giving readers across the Buffalo area a chance to start blogs, post news items, and post video. YourHub started in Denver, a joint venture of Scripps Howard and Media News, with the technical work done by Indigio. Leigh Balcom, sales and operations manager in Bufalo, has been impressed, according to news articles:
“The best thing about YourHub is that it allows people to report on things the newspaper may not,” he said. “Events like Little League games, neighborhood events and even some issues affecting the community.”
The Buffalo YourHub has more than 550 registered users who have generated more than 2,000 pieces of content since the site went live.
“I hired two online interactive managers who go into the community and talk up the product and encourage people to post content,” Balcom said.
There is competition. The Tribune Company devised its own software for TribLocal. And one of the more promising new businesses that is already doing the same thing is Village Soup, which started in Maine. Village Soup is doing so well, that the Knight Foundation is giving it a grant:
VillageSoup in Maine receives $885,000 to build free software to allow others to replicate the citizen journalism and community participation site VillageSoup.
The optimism that shines through this and the other grants is a great counterweight to some of the negativism occasionally heard at industry gatherings. Read more about the other Knight grants, to Adrian Holovaty, to a project on high-tech civic media, to computer students studying journalism, to a journalism incubator in Arizona.
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