all the news that's fit to tweet

How to go hyperlocal without much of a payroll? The Business Insider tells us here what the New York Times has up its sleeve:

The New York Times Co. (NYT) is roping in more hyperlocal news content with a new announcement: They just made a deal with Fwix, the real-time newswire that filters and finds local information on blogs, news sites, and social media sites.

Um, okay. If you check Fwix's "about page", what you find is that out of a staff of twelve, there are a lot of engineers but no reporters. There is, however, one "content editor."
Here's what Fwix has to say about itself:

Founded in October 2008 by Darian Shirazi, Fwix was originally designed to filter news & information on the internet by local area. Since then, the team at Fwix has built technology designed to filter and find the best local information on blogs, news sites, and social media sites. Currently, Fwix is active in over 160 cities in the US, Canada, UK & Ireland, Australia, and New Zealand.

Now, Fwix seems like a smart, techy outfit that probably provides an alternative to traditional news media for lots of folks supremely interested in where they live. Nowthat the NYTimes has hooked up, I suspect Fwix stands to make a lot of money. In fact, I wish I had thought of it. But really, is it the source of news you expect from the gray lady? Yeah, didn't think so. Back to Business Insider:

According to Outsell analyst Ken Doctor, the NYT partnership "would have seemed like a punchline a decade ago." But the "now the FWIX partnership is part of the expanding local experimentation of the Times and tells us lots about the Times’ strategic direction, its multi-front competition with Dow Jones and a more nuanced recognition of what putting content under your brand means these digital days."

"It’s the end of an era, and the Times is clearly moving on a new philosophy: gather as much higher-quality content under its brands, national and regional, on as low a cost basis as possible," he added.

22 is a lonely number

Really, it's all about the money.

As word comes down that the Seattle Post-Intelligencer may be the first major American daily to go online only, Ken Doctor of Content Bridges does the math, confirming what we all suspected, that based on revenues, digital news sites can only support very small news staffs.

Where will the reporting (pardon: content) come from? Bloggers? Citizen J's? Some TBD hybrid? And how much time will all the digital extras (video, sound slides, tweets, fast-break updates) suck from out-of-the-building reporting by that skeleton crew?

From Doctor's blog:

Now 22 is an interesting number. Let's do the math. The PI starts with 170 newsroom staffers. Online-only, it moves to 22, which would be 12.9% of its print staff. That's a number worth remembering.

As the Christian Science Monitor, the Capital Times, the East Valley Times and the Detroit papers, among others, all engaging in one form or another of flipping the switch (going from print to digital) or dayscrapping (reducing the days of print publication or delivery), I've often gotten this question from the press: "Why don't papers just go online-only?" We talk about the economics of print vs. online vs. hybrid, and I've guesstimated that if metro dailies indeed flipped the switch, they'd be able to "afford" about 15% of their newsroom staffs. So that 12.9% number confirms my guess. With metros taking in 10%-plus of their revenues from digital advertising now, that's about all the current business will support.

It's a sobering number.