Community and local news site Topix struck an agreement to power discussion forums for NBC Universal’s 10 local owned and operated station web sites. Topix already does this for selected newspapers and Gannett TV sites and claims 100 media partners for its local news and/or community features.

Topix CEO Chris Tolles says that “60% of the ‘articles’ on Topix are now ‘original,’ from scratch, posts not referring to a story [and] 75% of the pageviews on Topix are on the commentary.” Here’s his post responding to Google’s introduction of local news, which argues that crawling existing sources isn’t the answer, and if you want truly local news you have to create some of your own.

Related Topics: Search Engines: News Search Engines

About The Author: Greg Sterling is a Contributing Editor at Search Engine Land. He writes a personal blog Screenwerk, about SoLoMo issues and connecting the dots between online and offline. He also posts at Internet2Go, which is focused on the mobile Internet. Follow him @gsterling. See more articles by Greg Sterling