John Geraci Talks To PSFK About outside.in And The Changing Media

outside.in is a site that aggregates local news mainly from blogs. Users can find out what’s happening around them - from gossip to shopping to crime. When we bumped into co-founder John Geraci the other day he talked to us about the power of local media and the challenge it presents media networks. We thought we’d follow up and ask him a few questions.

John, Since you launched the site, we’ve seen a number of local-services like Yelp become popular and highly influential. How is outside.in doing?

outside.in is doing really well. Since January alone our traffic has more than doubled, and it isn’t showing any signs of slowing. We’re talking with all of the big web and news media players constantly. We also just raised $3 million and are bringing in some really talented people, includingMark Josephson, former GM of About.com, as the new CEO. And we’re getting ready to launch two big new features. So it’s an exciting time to be getting up and going to work in the mornings.

As far as our impact, some time around three months ago outside.in suddenly started popping up in random places for me - overheard at a cafe, and so forth. So I knew we were starting to get into people’s mental map of the web. I think in the past year or so people have started looking to the web more and more to know what’s going on in their neighborhood, and I think outside.in has played a definite role in that. When we first launched, it was newsworthy that a site was trying to organize content on the web by location (by neighborhood, no less). Now that’s becoming something that people are beginning to expect of the web.

At the same time, I think that our impact is just beginning to be felt. A few months from now, with our new products released and in use, that impact will be much broader and deeper.

We wrote back in 2005 on PSFK about the threat local media could pose mainstream media - lots of contributors bypassing traditional news networks and their reports aggregated in some constructive way for readers. In some ways outside.In is such a system. Do you think that your site, and sites like it, could be the future of news?

Wow, that was very prescient of you! ;)

Yes, I do think that this model is the future of news, to a certain extent. And in a sense, that future is already here: when I want to read about a particular news story, I don’t go buy a Wall Street Journal or turn on ABC News, I go to Google News, or to outside.in if it’s a story happening in my area. Once I’m at those sites, I may read several different articles about that story, none of which originated on those sites themselves. The articles may be by professional journalists, or they may be by bloggers, or they may be some hybrid of the two.

So the news media landscape is being altered already, becoming more heterogeneous. And our definition of what news is is changing. It used to be that “news” was something created by employees of a news agency. Now news is more like current, topical content published by anyone - from newspapers on down to tiny bloggers. It comes from a broad spectrum of publishers, from the very big to the very little, and major news media just represent one end of that spectrum. And the reading public decides in the end who to reward with their readership.

That doesn’t mean necessarily that the big news media are going away. They adapt, becoming more heterogeneous themselves, publishing along more parts of that spectrum. Newspapers are already doing this - look at how many bloggers write for nytimes.com these days. I would expect newspapers will take that strategy even further in the future.

In this new landscape, big news media also become looked to as trusted brands of information. Sure, anyone can publish news content, but who do you trust to give you the best facts, some blogger you’ve never heard of, or the NY Times? So even in this climate, news companies have an edge over smaller news publishers. Though some bloggers are beginning to brand themselves enough as trustworthy sources of news that they’re overcoming this barrier. Once that happens, the landscape may change even more.

Sure, we hear you about the idea that big media is not going to go away - and there are publishers like the NY Times and Guardian leveraging blogs well - but there are many other news outlets, especially TV and niche financial or political newspapers, that are way behind. Do you really think that mainstream media is agile enough to take advantage of the opportunities that platforms like outside.in offer?

Some are and some aren’t. The ones that are stand a chance of becoming the future hubs of news content, the ones that aren’t will be consigned increasingly to the periphery. We’re definitely in a period where the role of news hub is up for grabs more than in the past. Being agile is crucial to succeeding in that situation, though having lots of money, millions of existing customers, and the privilege of having been the hub in the previous system counts for a lot, too.

Who’s ideas are inspiring your own work at outside.in right now?

The idea of Yahoo’s new FireEagle service is inspiring. FireEagle is a feature that allows people to give their current location to trusted third party applications, so that those applications can send them content relevant to what’s directly around them. If Yahoo can get that in wide use, that could have really interesting effects on how local content gets distributed and read.

Also, the things that users are doing with Twitter is really interesting right now. When the earthquake in China happened, someone set up a Twitter feed called chinaquakewatch that tracked people who were in the quake area using Twitter. You could watch up-to-the-second eyewitness accounts coming in from halfway around the world. That’s the very far end of that news spectrum I was talking about, and it’s exciting to see it taking shape.

Finally, Clay Shirky’s recent book Here Comes Everybody is hugely inspiring. It’s very insightful as far as the big picture on how web technology is transforming society. Clay argues that we’re still at the early stages of that transformation, and that the bulk of it has yet to come. That’s exciting to think about. Keeps me thinking about the future, which is what I like to do.

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