Local News Aggregators - The Future [Journalism 2.0]
Digital Banff is a website that aggregates news about the picturesque mountain town of Banff, Alberta. It’s also the future of journalism.
Jim Swanson is the creator of Digital Banff. A bit of an early adopter, he created the site in 1994 as a way to keep track of websites that he was interested in. He developed his own content management system from scratch using Filemaker.
Running DigitalBanff has always been a part-time job for Swanson as he is the Communications Director for the Banff Centre, a globally respected arts and cultural institution.
If you go to Digital Banff you’ll find a very clean site with links to stories about Banff, weather conditions, events, movie listings and Banff area webcams.
To find content Swanson has a routine every morning where a script that he created opens up 20 different web pages. These are mostly Google searches about Banff and Banff related subjects as well as newspaper homepages. He subscribes to about 200 different RSS feeds and uses Google Alerts to gather content as well. From this pool of information he decides what he wants to link to.
The only advertising on the site are Google ads.
“I’m not interested in drumming up ad sales,” says Swanson. However he estimates he makes about $100 a month from Digital Banff. The money covers his web hosting and web connection expenses.
For a small local site that does nothing but link out Swanson attracts a large amount of traffic. About 1000 people a day, with 600 of those being locals.
“The page is more aimed at locals. People who are already here.”
He gets a ton of direct traffic, people who have either bookmarked Digital Banff or have it as their homepage. His largest referrer is Google by far where he appears on the second page of search results when searching “Banff”.
He doesn’t consider himself a journalist. He describes it more as “aggregation and I’m somewhat of an editor.”
Doesn’t attend council meetings or do other original reporting. However in the past he has posted local election results to his site.
I asked Swanson if any of the newspapers had said anything to him either positive or negative about his site. While there was an offhand comment from a former editor at the Crag and Canyon (the local Sun Media weekly) that he was making his bones off the brunt of their hard work, Swanson disagrees.
“If I wasn’t linking their stories they’d get less traffic. People aren’t going to go the Crag and Canyon site or make it their homepage because they only update once a week. Any traffic they can get pointed their way why would they not like that. My links point directly to the pages. I send people to the original sources.”
While Swanson hasn’t expressed any interest in monetizing his audience someone like Matt Drudge has. The Drudge Report is one of the most popular news site on the internet and has incredibly high engagement from its audience. The audience comes back again and again to see what Drudge is linking to.
And all the Drudge report is, is a collection of links to other stories (with a dash of original reporting now and then from Drudge).
What’s the point in all of this? Major mainstream media is just now figuring out that linking out to outside content (not written by them or contained within their own walled gardens) is a good thing and builds credibility.
Why is there no Digital Calgary? Why is there no Canadian Drudge Report? These portals are incredibly useful to their audience and potential moneymakers for the mainstream media.
I am probably stealing this but a big part of journalism going forward is going to consist of taking the fire hose of information that is available on the web and distilling it down to a water fountain for the consumer.
Local news aggregators like Digital Banff are part of the future of journalism.