Topix to Launch Four New Partnerships This Week

(MoneyWatch)  It's time to check back in with our friends over at Topix, where, a couple months ago, CEO Chris Tolles told me the "(user) participation is the content." He was referring the the high volume of comments on Topix pages all over small towns in the U.S., where he has been strategically focusing the company's content development strategy.

In a couple days, Topix will be announcing a new deal with lat49, an online advertising network that delivers geo-contextual, targeted display ads. "With this new partnership," spokesperson Sarah Tonzi explains, "the lat49 ads are integrated into the maps on every local news page on Topix."

One intriguing feature is how, when a user zooms in or pans out, the ad units change, which the company says "allows advertisers to reach consumers on many levels."

Topix calls itself "the largest news community on the web." In line with its hyper-local strategy, it is also launching partnerships with several other services this week -- ServiceMagic, which is a "home improvement service provider," and Marchex, which provides local business listings as in a yellow page directory.

In addition, Topix is now providing local news and sports headlines for the new local Mapquest product.

As we've discussed here over the months, this kind of emerging content model might make sense for the dying newspaper companies. They could juxtapose traditional news and feature articles with user-generated-content (UGC) from highly localized communities of users. The secret sauce could be integrating relevant federal government databases, many of which look to be coming online soon, under the Obama administration, with local and state records, such as crime reports and real estate transactions.

The magic of this model is it leverages two trends that are not going to go away anytime soon -- much greater access to information for all, and much greater interactivity with information by all.

My own sense of this model is that trained journalists could act as "geo-hub editors" (my term), gathering the UGC from citizens and tipsters, doing original reporting where justified, and linking up various voices in each community (bloggers, commenters, Flickr posters, Yelp writers, etc., into a robust, interactive communications channel that goes both ways, generating multiple ad and sponsorship opportunities along the way.

Or, newspapers could decide to just sit back and watch companies like Topix continue to eat their lunch.