Newspaper Publishers Buy Topix

reports Three of the nation's biggest newspaper publishers, the Gannett Company, Knight-Ridder Inc. and the Tribune Company, are joining forces to buy three-fourths of Topix.net, a Web site that monitors more than 10,000 online news sources.... Topix.net is a news aggregator, continuously monitoring updates on thousands of news media Web sites as well as government sites and organizing links to articles in more than 300,000 subject areas. Topix.net already keeps track of news from sites operated by Gannett, Knight-Ridder and Tribune, but the acquisition will allow it to approach the newspapers' online advertisers about using its technology for customizing ads. It will also let Topix.net add material like television listings.

Topix provides news for many different cities. For example, Tulsa's News is available here.

David Kesmodel and Vauhini Vara at WSJ say that News Portals Like Google News and Topix Attract the Masses, But Irk Some Editors - For years, news organizations have had a love-hate relationship with Web sites like Google News that aggregate articles from many sources. Newspapers and television stations like the traffic they get when such sites link to their online stories, but they don't like playing second fiddle to the Internet companies as a news destination.... News organizations are highly competitive. They prefer to be the first choice on news junkies' priority list. They also don't like it when their stories don't appear on an aggregator's list of stories on a particular topic -- or show up as the eighth headline in a long list of articles on a given topic.

James Joyner at OTB bloggs OTB has been a GoogleNews site for a couple of weeks now and I've definitely gotten some traffic from it. Not only do they excerpt my stories within eight minutes or so of my posting them but they've even thumbnailed images from the site. While I felt a little sheepish about the whole thing at first, reasoning that my coverage was not as worthwhile as that of the New York Times or Washington Post, I've reconsidered. Most of what one gets from even the Big Boys on a hot story is straight off the AP or AFP wires. My excerpt and link to that is as valuable as anyone else's. Plus, on most stories, I include multiple links and excerpts, making my post a one-stop-shopping point for those interested in the story.

While I can understand the Big Boys being upset that some podunk paper or, shudder, a blog gets essentially the same priority on the aggregators as they do, it's doubtful they are losing substantial business. It's not as if people are sitting on the NYT or WaPo site hitting "refresh" constantly.

Update (1025): Rich Skrenta just e-mailed suggesting that I take a look at Topix' aggregation of the Terri Schiavo news. It's interesting although it's not immediately obvious why it would be preferable to GoogleNews' search result for Terri Schiavo. The latter appears to do a better job of consolidating stories based on the same feed (e.g., lumping all the AP versions together). That said, I'm more accustomed to GoogleNews and thus familiar with how to use it.