Topix To Power Community For Local NBC Affiliates

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.