Chris: I have a great team of folks and when people do a kickass job and it is almost an honor to be a part of a group of people who are just much better than I am so I think that is my favorite part of the job.
Zorianna: Hi, welcome to Dog and Pony, I am Zorianna Kit. Chris Tolles is the CEO of Topix, a news aggregator site that draws from thousands of sources to make custom new sites based on location. Chris welcome!
Chris: Thank you.
Zorianna: Alright, so let us chat about Topix. New sites drawing in all these different websites, how does it all work?
Chris: So, we started off by aggregating news from 50,000 different sources including 25,000 different mainstream news sources and 25,000 different blogs. And we are able to categorize it by topic as well as by location so we put in the ability to geo-localize all the news by the article content. And we just started off by doing that. And we ended up with zip code level local news for every single zip code in the country.
Zorianna: You mean to take into account those local papers?
Chris: Yeah. Well, it turns out it is actually most of a local story, no paper really gets down with a zip code level coverage of the news but you might have an article about given a store opening, a car accident or whatever. We can pin it exactly to a critical location and on top of that, what we did was give people the ability to comment on that as well as being able to comment about their location or community or community of interest. So now, 6% of the comments coming here, coming in without a referring article and we are getting about 110,000 comments a day across 20,000 different cities and towns. So, that is the place where things are really interesting.
Zorianna: Wow! So, there is a lot of dialogue now between the readers?
Chris: Yes. And in fact it makes up for the fact that really nobody is providing local news down at the zip code.
Zorianna: Does this site use only existing technology or did you have to develop your own?
Chris: We had to build it all ourselves actually, so when we launched in 2004, we pretty much have a state of the arc localization engine for news and categorization engine. In fact after we launched, there are several people who have come up with things that they have sort of tried to chase us but no one has really gotten this down to the local level.
Zorianna: How does your company make money?
Chris: Well, there is a couple of things we do. One is that we do power newsfeeds for people who want local news so for example the front page of CNN has a local news which is powered by us as well as Earth Link and—have local newsfeeds plus to make money for three things like that as well as selling advertising primarily into local folks on the site.
Zorianna: So, I would go to your site and plug in my zip code and then be able to find articles that are related to that?
Chris: Articles are commentary but really the way people find us is they are on some search engine or they are looking for something on the net and because we have such a huge amount of commentary and information about you know where we happened to live, you are going to find us that way.
Zorianna: What do you think is the future for people in receiving their news? I mean it is the changing so much newspaper readership is down, things seem to be switching to the web, where is it all headed?
Chris: It is funny. There are more people reading news than ever before. If you go look at the status of a few center for the internet, it has basically come out and said, “Hey, people within 18 to 25 read more news than any other demographic.” News is great, everybody likes news. It turns out that the economic model that newspapers use which rely on local monopolies and were able to charge huge amounts of money for advertising, that is kind of declined. But the number of producers of news is huge.
A few years ago, people worried a lot about news becoming only from four or five different sources and getting to the point where only a few people control all the news. And with the internet that just is not happening. In fact it is fragmenting and now there is thousands and thousands or there are thousands and thousands of people who are providing news. And that is where we see it going and we see it to the place where the local news paper has failed to provide news for your neighborhood or my neighborhood and there is really no economic model besides one word that people are contributing it themselves it is going to work. So, we are pretty much a place where people are at least putting in commentary and putting in information about where they live and talking about it amongst themselves.
So, I think that that is one place where you are going to get the news. There can be people who are blogging about things. There is going to be mainstream news covering big events but I mean I am on a show like this and I think this is a fine replacement for some of the stuff we went before because the production cost are lower, you get more niche interesting content. And that is what we are trying to do on a local level. And again, it is probably not journalistically sound to look at 10 people who are arguing about a sheriff’s race in Natchitoches, Louisiana but it is something and I always think something is better than nothing.
Zorianna: So, it is not just articles or the written word, it is also video news as well, right?
Chris: We do not have as much, we have some video on the site and I think that that will expand going forward but if you go kind of look at the amount of really local news that is on video, there is one of those divide by zero errors so they go like how many local news stories are there in video everyday divided by 30,000? And there is like you know .0001. So, we think that down the road that will be very important but at the moment, all that YouTube stuff is not really aimed locally.
Zorianna: Yeah.
Chris: It is more something where we are getting more taxed and more people who are coming in and easily putting in tax I suppose to photos or putting in video or something.
Zorianna: Alright, so we are going to play a little game right now called None of your Business.
Chris: Alright.
Zorianna: I am going to ask you a series of questions and you can either answer them or tell me that it is none of my business.
Chris: Alright.
Zorianna: What is your hidden talent?
Chris: I know all the two letter words in scrabble.
Zorianna: Do you really?
Chris: I do.
Zorianna: What is your favorite news source?
Chris: Topix, but beyond Topix the Wall Street Journal.
Zorianna: What is your favorite part of your job?
Chris: Working with great people. I think because I have a great team of folks and when people do a kick ass job and it is almost an honor to be part of a group of people who are just much better than I am so I think that is my favorite part of the job.
Zorianna: Thanks for playing None of your Business. Chris Tolles, CEO of Topix, thank you so much for joining us. If you have questions, comments or ideas for guests, please e-mail us at info@dogandpony.com. I am Zorianna Kit. Thanks for watching.
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