I love that slide coming from Chris Tolles‘ Web 2.0 Summit presentation. Tolles is the CEO of Topix, a well-known hyperlocal news aggregator. It clearly shows why Topix decided to allow user-generated content in their site back in April.
In it, he tries to extrapolate the number of daily local news stories coming out of traditional media outlets (newspapers, radio and local TV) and comes up with a grand total of 22,293. Given that there are about 43,000 zip codes in the US, this means every zip code gets 0.5 stories per day on average. Not much if you’re trying to build zip-code driven news aggregator. Smart move.
Seb Provencher's Blog 
I had met Chris before but never had the chance to see him present. I thought he had one of the more compelling stories to tell, especially in the context of the other Edge companies. It hit at a number of different levels including the one that really crossed my mind … have traditional local companies really covered the aggregate local market?
I had met Chris before but never had the chance to see him present. I thought he had one of the more compelling stories to tell, especially in the context of the other Edge companies. It hit at a number of different levels including the one that really crossed my mind … have traditional local companies really covered the aggregate local market?