The Chicago Tribune just opened up its ChicagoNow.com site for a very early first look. Over at Recovering Journalist, Mark Potts says it’s “the future.” It’s still a work in progress, I know, but I wish I could get more excited about what’s there so far. Their promotional video says it will be the best of Huffington Post and Facebook rolled into a local package, and clearly they have high hopes that they’ve come up with a new approach to what a local news site can be.
To me, despite some very attractive design work, so far it’s a low-tech letdown: Some interesting-looking bloggers holding forth on local topics, with a common registration system so you can register once and comment across the entire community.
But can blogs-and-comments, no matter how you package them, really make for a resource that penetrates enough of a local market to matter to advertisers? The promo video suggests there will be a lot more coming over time. I hope so, because until there is I’m not sure how they’re going to build scale.
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