Outside.in for Publishers Blog

Mark Josephson Hits The Nail On The Head

Fri, 11 Dec 2009 10:46:49 -0500

In a recent Q&A with econsultancy (http://bit.ly/4TmdL6) Mark Josephson said:

Outside.in’s Neighborhood News Pages can help local newspapers (and TV and radio stations) by solving a few key problems for them: extending their editorial coverage to a more granular, neighborhood level with no additional headcount; automating the content syndication and network relationships with local bloggers; the geographic organization of their own content and the creation of more high-quality hyperlocal ad inventory. This is where the local media companies have a huge head start.

We hope you agree…

The Series B Round: What It Means for Publishers

Wed, 09 Dec 2009 09:46:54 -0500

You may have seen the announcement of our Series B round of financing. It’s a mark of a very exciting and busy time for us. The ongoing support of our existing investors and the addition of a few more continue the validation that all of you have been giving us since you first started registering for Outside.in for Publishers. The news about our partnership with CNN hit today, but that’s not the only big partner we’ve added recently. The list of news outlets sporting Neighborhood News Pages now includes The Chicago Tribune, The New York Post, StLToday.com, The Baltimore Sun, NBC4i in Columbus and SeaCoastOnline among many others. We’re building an ecosystem on which all parts are interdependent, and with the addition of a few more big partners, all signs point to growth throughout the system. Here are some highlights:

More and Better Products: At the risk of stating the obvious, the injection of cash will enable us to expand our resources. We can now accelerate our progress on OIP feature requests that have been rolling in since our launch in June. From an API to new widgets to topic tags, our queue is long and exciting. Furthermore, we can build out the other pillars of the business, such as Outside.in for Bloggers.

More Traffic: The hyperlocal content served on all the partner sites comes from our aggregated headlines and links, sorted by location as always. In the OIP registration process, you submitted your feeds to our system; therefore, your stories are included in our aggregated content. The bigger our partner network, the more opportunities there are for traffic to come your way. This is especially true when we add a national partner.

More Content: The prospect of having headlines appear on major media sites is a big incentive for bloggers to join our network. The feeds they submit are available to you in your Outside.in for Publishers account. You’ll have access to more stories to more thoroughly cover the neighborhoods and towns in your market. The explosion of local hyperlocal content will continue to your benefit!

And that’s just the beginning. The sun is shining at the Outside.in World HQ and not just because we got new windows with no blinds.

Maintenance Complete and Successful

Wed, 04 Nov 2009 00:38:58 -0500

We have completed tonight’s scheduled maintenance to great effect.

All OIP pages and widgets are now fully stable. The most noticeable improvements are on the Tag Stories pages. In the past, especially if you were blacklisting many feeds, your Tag Stories pages would load very slowly or not at all. Now, it’s an entirely different story. Those pages are now quite snappy.

We hope you enjoy the upgrade and we thank you for your patience.

Database Upgrade 11/3/09 10pm EST--Widgets Stable Throughout!

Mon, 02 Nov 2009 16:20:19 -0500

A quick heads up that we’ve scheduled a database upgrade for tomorrow (11/3/09) at 10pm EST. We’re making our DB *more powerful,* which should have positive effects all around.

*****IMPORTANT*****

Maps, Headline lists and Neighborhood News Pages WILL NOT BE DOWN during this maintenance. Because of our clever caching, they will remain stable throughout.

Your dashboard at publishers.outside.in WILL BE DOWN. It should be back up at around 11pm EST. If you’re an obsessive feed manager, story tagger, or layout configurer, I’m sorry; you’ll have to take an hour break.

Where'd you put your hyperlocal? #2: The Custom Wrap

Thu, 01 Oct 2009 13:32:45 -0400

The Custom Wrap works best when you already have a few pages dedicated to hyperlocal and you want to supplement that coverage with outside.in’s aggregated content. Whereas The Standard is the fastest way to get hyperlocal when you’re starting from scratch, The Custom Wrap is an excellent way to deepen your coverage in an existing neighborhood or scale a hyperlocal project to more neighborhoods and towns than your resources have afforded thus far.

The Layout Configuration: You already have custom URLs, wraps, and a brand for your local pages. Now, create a separate Neighborhood News Page layout in a separate stylesheet for each town or neighborhood you would like to cover. Drop the code into the center well on the corresponding page for that community. If you have community-specific content you’d like to feature, put the headlines above the map and anything else in the sidebars around the maps. Now, drop links to these pages in strategic, traffic-driving positions around your site. You could even build dropdown menus that drive your readers to these pages like the NYPost did.

Advanced config: If you have available development resources, there’s a way to do this by just making one Neighborhood News Page. There’s also a way to make the dropdown menus of the Headline Lists and Map Widgets redirect to your custom pages. Contact jared@outside.in for instructions.

The Feed Management: (The same as The Standard) The goal is to maximize your journalistic coverage and organize it by location, so accept all or most of the mainstream media feeds and the more professional blogs that offer responsible reporting.

The Benefit: This is a much deeper integration of Outside.in content that makes the entire page specific to the community, not just the piece that outside.in serves. You get the SEO benefit of URLs that include the neighborhood name, such as http://www.nypost.com/news/local/manhattan/chelsea. Furthermore, while it is possible to automatically specify your ad tags to the neighborhood called by our javascript in The Standard implementation, you might find it easier to geotarget your ads with The Custom Wrap. The trick to this integration is that once you build the pages, you have to be clever about promoting them. We suggest building a simple, yet eye-catching box of links to neighborhoods that are important to your readers. You can see good examples in the slideshows at the top of scnow.com and counton2.com.

Examples:

The New York Post

SeaCoast Online

Fox4KC

Where'd you put your hyperlocal? #1: The Standard

Fri, 25 Sep 2009 17:26:54 -0400

Wondering how to use Outside.in for Publishers with your site? This is the first of several posts in which I’ll detail the implementation practices that have become most popular in OIP’s first two months on the market. Follow the directions in the post or let it trigger your creativity to do something new and exciting.

Let’s start with…

The Standard

The Layout Configuration: Make a new page using one of your existing templates (article page or section front are the most common) and replace the guts with the JS for a Neighborhood News Page that has your metro area as the default. Give it a simple and clear URL, such as xxx.com/neighborhoods and link to it from your site nav. Then, put Map Only or Headline List Widgets on your homepage and article pages.

The Feed Management: The goal is to maximize your journalistic coverage and organize it by location, so you accept all or most of the mainstream media feeds and the more professional blogs that offer responsible reporting.

The Benefit: The most simple and fast route to upwards of hundreds of new pages on your site—one for every town and neighborhood in your market—The Standard is an excellent choice for publishers who want to increase their local reach but don’t have an excess of resources. By accepting a high number of stories from trustworthy feeds, you can quickly cover areas you never have. By putting maps and headline lists on your high traffic pages, you increase the visibility of your new coverage and help your readers grow accustomed to navigating news by location.

Examples:

Chicago Breaking News

Map on right sidebar of homepage

Map on right sidebar of article page

Neighborhood News Page

WREG.com

Headline list on right sidebar of homepage

Headline list on right sidebar of article page

Neighborhood News Page

The view from my desk. The pins represent markets in which we...

Fri, 18 Sep 2009 13:55:57 -0400

The view from my desk. The pins represent markets in which we have active OIP Users. Clearly, the west coast needs to step it up a notch. To see a rolling announcement of new partners be sure to visit our company blog where Camilla Cho announces a new one almost every day.

Use OIP To Make Your Own Twitter Widget

Fri, 11 Sep 2009 17:54:52 -0400

On the main blog we announced a new page (Twitter Widget of the Hour) that will display the latest Twitter widget we make using OIP, as well as an archive of all the previous widgets. Today’s feature is tweets from players in the MLB pennant race. Go here to take a gander and put it on your site or just grab the code right away.

It’s a lot of fun for us to come up with new widgets for you, but the real power of OIP is that it’s a platform. So, you can make your own Twitter widget on any subject such as Local Politicians, Local Bands, Local Sports Stars…anything really. Here’s how:

Create a new Outside.in for Publishers account (even if you already have one). Choose your own market if your topic is locally focused. If your topic isn’t tied to a specific area (such as Pennant Race Tweets), choose a rural market, somewhere in which you don’t expect to find any other feeds.
In your new OIP account, go to Manage Feeds and deactivate all of the existing feeds.
Add Twitter feeds. Go to the Find People page on Twitter. (You’ll have to log in to Twitter.) Search for the person whose account you want to aggregate. If you find them, click on “RSS feed of [user]’s tweets.” Copy that URL (the feed URL) and add it to your OIP account by clicking on Add A New Feed in Manage Feeds. It’s helpful to check the box that says My Site Publishes This Feed. (It’s a good idea to read a few tweets before you add the feed. You want to make sure the account is authentic and not an imposter.) Rinse and repeat until done.
Go to Configure Layouts in your OIP account and create a Headline List. Be sure to uncheck “Show ‘Explore a neighborhood’ header and region dropdowns” and “Show article summaries.” Set the font and color styles to fit your site. Then comes The Most Important Step: copy the code for the Headline List and put it on your site!
From time to time, go to Tag Stories>Stories from My Feeds in OIP and add the major metro area of your market as a Neighborhood Tag to tweets you want to display.

And that’s all. 5 simple steps on our platform to displaying tweets on your site in a tidy Headline List. We can’t wait to see what you come up with. Leave questions in the comments.

US Open/Twitter Widget

Mon, 31 Aug 2009 16:20:08 -0400

Check out the really cool US Open Twitter mash-up widget we made with Outside.in for Publishers. To see it in action go here: http://bit.ly/1FjmEM.

If you want to cut straight to putting it on your site, pick up the code here: http://pastie.org/600829.

If you want to customize the widget follow these 4 simple steps:

1. Create an account on Outside.in for Publishers (publishers.outside.in), selecting New York Metro Area as your market.

2. Look under manage feeds and blacklist all those that aren’t twitter accounts for tennis players.

3. Go to configure layouts and build a headline list with your styles. (Make sure to NOT show the ‘Explore a Neighborhood Header’ nor the ‘Article Summaries.’)

4. Copy the code and paste it on your US Open page or Sports page.

It only takes a few minutes to make and The US Open only lasts two weeks, so put the widget up today!

Our first Case Study is up on the outside.in blog:...

Fri, 21 Aug 2009 17:05:00 -0400

Our first Case Study is up on the outside.in blog: http://bit.ly/ZjDFt. It details Chicago Tribune’s implementation of Outside.in for Publishers. You’ll likely find it particularly interesting how they use map widgets on chicagotribune.com to increase traffic to their Neighborhood News Pages on chicagobreakingnews.com.

GeoTagging Improvements

Tue, 18 Aug 2009 16:51:59 -0400

We made two improvements in our location detection system that will cause you to see more stories in more neighborhoods and towns in your OIP accounts.

Our system is now much better at reading bylines. If you’re not yet using them, give it a shot. If you already are, consider making them more granular. Rather than making your byline NEW YORK, try MIDTOWN, MANHATTAN. We’ll pick up those cues and add more levels of location organization to your stories.
Headlines are now much more transparent to our system, and we’re picking up more location data from them. What’s a better headline than GALLERY OPENING? How about GALLERY OPENING IN CHELSEA?

As always the best way to give tips to our GeoTagger is to include the neighborhood name and the full name of the place you’re writing about (Barrows Elementary School is better than Barrows Elementary) in the story itself.

New Output: Headline Lists!

Tue, 11 Aug 2009 16:09:37 -0400

Today, we’re launching a new widget in Outside.in for Publishers: Headline Lists. Imagine a Neighborhood News Page without the map—that’s a Headline List. It’s light, fast, and puts the stories your users want to click on at the forefront.

What Is It?

A list of aggregated headlines from mainstream media sources and blogs about a specific metro area, city, town, or neighborhood. Set the region in the Associated Region field when creating a Headline List in Configure Layouts.
A dropdown menu like on your Homepage and Sidebar Map Widget. If you create a Neighborhood News Page in the same stylesheet as your Headline List, the dropdown menu will redirect to your Neighborhood News Page. If you don’t have a Neighborhood News Page in the same stylesheet, the headlines will refresh directly in the widget.
Stories from your feeds will be prioritized by rolling to the top of the list.

What You Can Do With It?

Put it on Article Pages to drive your readers to more content in the same area and/or to your Neighborhood News Pages. This is especially useful if you have article templates specific to certain regions of your market, such as metro or county news pages.
Put it on Homepages and Section Fronts to offer aggregated local headlines from a variety of sources or an elite few. Your status as a destination for local news will improve and return visits and user engagement will increase.
Create new pages for all the towns and neighborhoods in your market. Not keen on maps? Use Headline Lists to build out neighborhood pages as you might with a Neighborhood News Page, but do it without a map.

Outside.in for Publishers is not a mapping platform; it’s a hyperlocal news platform. Headline List widgets are yet another step towards empowering publishers to display the hyperlocal news they want, the way they want it.

We hope you like them as much as we do, and as always, you’re feedback (constructive or otherwise) is welcome.

A Slightly Off-Topic Plug for a Free Screencast Tool

Fri, 07 Aug 2009 11:44:58 -0400

A quick breather to tell you all that I just downloaded Jing, and I recommend it to all of you. It’s a simple yet advanced tool for taking screenshots and screencasts. You select an area of your screen, tell Jing if you want to capture an image or a video, and then you can save it as a file or directly onto a webpage. They give you the URL to the web page and then you can send that link to whomever you want. Jing is a wildly useful program for recording bugs or sending feedback.

Check out this video to learn more.

Next time you send an email to publishers.feedback@outside.in, use Jing to make our conversation a little easier and a little faster.

Back to our regularly scheduled programming later today.

A quick kudos to StLToday.com for their excellent implementation...

Wed, 22 Jul 2009 17:35:00 -0400

A quick kudos to StLToday.com for their excellent implementation of OIP that went live yesterday. You can navigate to their Neighborhood News Pages directly from the homepage, from the Map Widget on their News and Metro Section Fronts, or just click here. So what’s that picture of Uncle Sam above? It’s the icon that’s on all of StLToday’s Neighborhood News Pages. When a user clicks on it, he is taken to the landing page for Outside.in’s GeoToolkit, our service for bloggers that helps them optimize their content for your Neighborhood News Pages. (Go ahead, try clicking on the picture.)

In this way, StLToday is embracing the news ecosystem that outside.in encourages. The more bloggers registered with GeoToolkit, the more compelling content StLToday will have on their Neighborhood News Pages, and the greater user engagement they’ll have.

So, once you get your Neighborhood News Pages live, consider what you can do to supplement outside.in’s efforts to encourage blogging in your community.

Region Suppression Tool

Mon, 20 Jul 2009 11:04:00 -0400

This morning, we deployed the Manage Regions tab of Outside.in for Publishers. This is the backbone of what will become your hub for understanding how we organize the geography of your market and for customizing that organization.

The first feature in Manage Regions is something many of you have requested and we’re happy to deliver: region suppression. It’s a dead simple tool that has one function: removing region names from your maps’ dropdown menus.

The three most common reasons for suppressing a region are:

1) We’ve included a neighborhood or town name that you’ve never heard of and/or that has little to no relevance in your market.

2) There are towns in your market that have little to no news and you don’t expect the situation to change.

3) You want to display a specific collection of neighborhoods within a city.*

When you click on Manage Regions, you’ll see an alphabetized list of every city, town, and neighborhood in your market. To suppress a region, just click the check box to its left. When the region name is light gray and the box is unchecked, you won’t see it in your dropdown menus.** If the list of regions is long and you want to find a specific
neighborhood or town, type its name into the filter box and click filter. It’ll narrow the list down for you.

Note that when you filter, the results are both region names containing your filter term and regions geographically contained within that region. For example, if your market is the New York Metro Area and you filter for Brooklyn, the results will be Brooklyn, NY and all of its neighborhoods. If you want to suppress all of Brooklyn, click the box next to Brooklyn and the whole borough will be suppressed. You do not need to click on all of its neighborhoods as well. If you want to show Brooklyn but not enable the user to drill down to its neighborhoods, then uncheck all of the neighborhoods and leave Brooklyn, NY checked.

You can reactivate a region whenever you want by rechecking the box next to its name. So, if there’s a breaking news story in a region you’ve supressed, just go to manage feeds, reactivate the region, and feature it on your site. (Don’t worry. All of the content will already be there. We still organize it even if you don’t want to display it.)

We started with a very basic tool because we wanted to deliver the suppression function to you quickly. Now that it’s live, we’ll begin to tweak the UI in order to maximize efficiency. As always, your feedback is welcome in that regard.

*For instance, you have a North Brooklyn Arts site and you want to display Williamsburg, Greenpoint, and Bushwick. Set the Associated Region to Brooklyn. Go to Manage Regions and filter for Brooklyn, then suppress all of the neighborhoods aside from Williamsburg, Greenpoint, and Bushwick.

**If you don’t see the change reflected on your site right away, do a hard refresh of your page to clear your browser’s cache.

OIP at The Poynter Institute

Wed, 15 Jul 2009 17:58:00 -0400

Thanks to Will Sullivan of The St. Louis Post-Dispatch for showing off Outside.in for Publishers to the journalism elite at The Poynter Institute this morning.

During his talk on Communities Matter, Will got to the heart of what makes OIP special:

“St. Louis really is a big city of little towns — With a turnkey solution, we’re able to target news at the microlocal level because people from The Hill don’t care about the City Council Meeting in Webster Groves.”

Check out the highlights of his talk and the discussion that follows by clicking here and scrolling down to Liveblogging: Communities Matter.

Release of Patch 1

Tue, 07 Jul 2009 12:03:00 -0400

We’re pleased to announce the release of our first significant update to Outside.in for Publishers. Here’s a list of fixes and additions you will see in Patch 1. Up next is a headline-only widget for those of you who want Neighborhood News but don’t necessarily want a map.

LAYOUT PREVIEW: We added a preview link to the last step of the widget configuration process: On this preview page, you can use the dropdowns to drill into all the neighborhoods in the region associated with the layout. So, you can see what you’re going to get before you put it on your page.
MAPS WITHOUT A DROPDOWN MENU: Want to put a Neighborhood News Page on a region specific page? Think your readers will be confused if they can select The Bronx on a /brooklyn page? Use our new option in Configure Layouts to hide the Explore a Neighborhood Dropdown Menu on a Neighborhood News Page or Map Widget. This map will only show the news for the Associated Region you choose while configuring your layout.
ATTRACT MORE BLOGGERS IN YOUR MARKET: We’ve changed the “put your stories on the map” text link in the footer of all of our maps to a bright orange “add your stories” button. Testing shows that the bright orange button attracts more clicks, which means you’ll get more content in your market from bloggers who see your maps.
EMAIL ADDRESSES NOT CASE-SENSITIVE: The email address you use to log in to OIP is no longer case-sensitive: This means that if you have an account with the address lauren@outside.in, you can log in as Lauren@outside.in and you cannot register a different account as Lauren@outside.in.
OLDER STORIES LINK SMARTER: The link to Older Stories at the bottom of your Neighborhood News Page will only appear if there actually are older stories to view. (Previously, that link was always there and drove the reader to a blank page if there weren’t older stories.)
EMAILS WHEN WE VISIT NEW FEEDS: You may have noticed that when you added a new feed in Manage Feeds, we would tell you that we’d send you an email once we pulled stories from that new feed, then the email would never come. We fixed this bug. You will now receive an email when we pull stories from a new feed for the first time.
100 PINS ON YOUR MAP: Want to make a giant map that has LOTS of stories on it? We increased the “Max of the Limit Pins on Map to:” field to 100. That’s a lot of pins…maybe start with 50 to see how that looks.
NEW PLACES AVAILABLE FASTER: Ever add a new place to our database when tagging stories? If so, you might have noticed that when you try to add that place to a second story right away, it didn’t work. This was because it took our database 30 mins. to update with the new place. Now, it happens in under 1 minute. This is great news for those of you who love Tagging Stories.

OIP is US Only

Thu, 25 Jun 2009 11:24:06 -0400

A quick FYI: Outside.in for Publishers only serves markets in the United States for now. International expansion is part of our long-term vision, but we’re not quite there yet.

Regions Cont'd. (Suppression)

Wed, 24 Jun 2009 15:55:26 -0400

Another point of fact on Regions: currently, there is no means to suppress a particular neighborhood or town from your dropdown menu. Coming soon, though, will be a tool that will enable you to see all the towns/neighborhoods in your market and suppress those you don’t want to show. It’ll be a Manage Regions section, if you will.