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Online Journalism News

Like Digg but local, multilingual and flexible

Posted: 08/08/07 By: Oliver Luft
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A social news platform allowing users to filter aggregated news by locality, create on-the-fly reporting and contribute collectively to stories and newsgathering has launched its services in 13 languages.

CityTools.net filters aggregated news along geographic lines from a global perspective down to a region or town level in languages including English, Spanish, Swedish, Norwegian, Danish, Finnish, Dutch, German.

"What we have got is a citizen journalism and aggregation site that is flexible from a geographic perspective, it's infinitely variable from a topic perspective and it’s variable according to language," Robert Cauthorn, CEO of CityTools, told Journalism.co.uk.

"Everything is contextualised. Tell us what you think of as home, what languages you want to speak and the groups you want to work with, and we'll flip things to meet your needs.

"Ranking is adjusted based on the context you've selected, so if you want to see ranked shared news and original stories about business in Spanish in London you can."

Search can be refined to look for particular categories in a specific area. A focused search on crime in Journalism.co.uk's hometown of Brighton could be broadened from just citywide to search its home county of Sussex, then again to England, then UK, Europe and then global.

Developers hope to drill down to neighbourhood level coverage by the beginning of next year.

Users of the site are also able to create teams around a certain topics, giving group members the ability to edit each others contributions; post links to related news and take all the content as an RSS feeds.

Team news can then also be exported and published as an automatically updating news section on blogs and other websites.

The site, Cauthorn added, can also allow teams to do live, real-time collaborative reporting as events happen, as well as developing a tool to manage ranked lists created by users about things they consider interesting or important.

Several lists can then be combined to produce ranked consensus across all related lists and languages.

"One of the core elements of newspapers is that they provide the connective tissue in a community," added Cauthorn.

"What we are trying to do is mimic that in an online space, to say 'we really want to be the connective tissue, here's where you can tell your stories and conduct those things that are important in a context we provide that is open-minded and based on a sharing principle.

"We want to be the place where the community gathers to discuss the issues that matter to it - allowing organisations to use this site to manage their information is one of the key elements."

Although still in beta public testing phase a further six languages will be added later in the year. The site will also begin offering language and place-specific online-only classified advertising and photos sharing.