Yesterday local news aggregator and community Topix announced a partnership with MediaNews Group to enable Web forums and comments for the newspaper publisher’s sites, including San Jose Mercury News and Denver Post. Other sites including GoErie.com, Zap2It.com, KOB.com, and CapitalTimes.com are also using Topix’s social platform.
Topix has shifted gears over the past year or so, switching its domain from .net to .com, and adding its own social news features in the hopes of becoming a hub for local citizen journalism.
For MediaNews Group and other paper publishers, enabling social features like forums, comments, photo uploads (for high school sports especially), is a great way to build ad inventory. And newspaper publishers need all the ad revenue they can get.
For the record, Topix is partly-owned by paper publishing giants Gannett, McClatchy and Tribune.