Innovation in College Media

Last week I got a chance to meet two of the guys behind "Crispy News":http://www.crispynews.com, a garage startup here in silicon valley.

Their technology lets anyone create their own “community news” site—according to Crispy’s definition, a site where “users submit stories for review, but instead of having an editor decide which stories go on the front page, the users do.”

They basically developed tools for anyone based on the concepts behind sites like Digg (www.digg.com) and Reddit (www.reddit.com)

I'm encouraging them to build a plugin for newspaper sites -- imagine the New York Times' "most emailed" top 10, but with little buttons where each user can directly give a positive vote to their favorite stories. I'll post again when they have some sort of module ready, but ping me at eric (at) unimedia.org if you want to get in touch with these guys in the meantime. They want to gauge newspaper's interest for the tool.

If readers could rank their favorite content from their campus paper, editors would have a better idea of what’s interesting to people and readers could feel a greater sense of control over/connection to the paper. Of course, readers' positive feelings tend to drive more, sticker traffic to papers’ sites.