A great writing platform!

You've got a story to tell. Do it on CityTools.

  • Our tools allow members to easily write stories -- whether news, fiction, poetry or satire -- and share them with the world.
  • You can work on a version as long as you want in draft mode -- the general public can't see it -- and publish it when you're ready.
  • If you choose to create or join a CityTools team you can assign any story or list to that team. If you want, you can even allow other team members to edit your story. Read more about this in our teams section.
  • Links to handy online tools -- a thesaurus, dictionary, wikipedia, even sites that talk about journalism -- are all available to help you in your writing.
  • You can assign a story to any one of our many topics, add special tags to help people find it, assign it to a particular geography all with a couple of mouse clicks.
  • Also, if you choose, with a single click you may submit your original story to our public news network where subscribing mainstream publishers can review it and, if they choose, publish it. There are no guarantees in this, but yes, you could start a career as a published writer on CityTools.

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Share news on CityTools

  • Social news and link sharing are all the rage right now and we can understand why. Afterall, the leadership of CityTools has been engaged in citizen journalism and shared news efforts since 1995!
  • Now we help kick that into a new realm by allowing you to share news that has regional significance. On other sites, a story about a single neighborhood issue gets lost in the noise. Because of CityTools' strong geographic tools, a single story about a local school issue can stand out in its community.
  • Like everything else on CityTools, you can specify a category, add tags, allow other team members to edit the works.

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A content manager to bring things together

  • You can do so many things on CityTools -- write stories, share stories, create lists, add web resources, specify georgraphy and topic, etc. -- that we've created a single interface where you can manage all your information.
  • Our content manager is a hub from which you can do most of your creative work on CityTools -- you can even use it to find and edit content from teams you might belong to.
  • You can use the content manager to do full text searches of content, filter content on different dimensions -- and lots more.

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Use our news quicktool to quickly share stories

  • Say you're surfing the net and you want to share a story you find with others. Highlight a little text on the page, click our news quicktool and you're one mouse click away from sharing that story with the world.
  • It makes sharing stories on CityTools super easy -- members may get it here.

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Help people find your story by topic

  • Some places like rigid organizations of categories -- called taxonomies. Other places like to allow people to create their own loose categories via tags -- these are sometimes called folksonomies. At CityTools, we say yes to both.
  • Every piece of content on the site must be assigned to a topic. However, if the topics we choose aren't good enough for you you can always add tags to content to help people find what you've done.

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The RSS newsdesk makes finding stories easy too

  • Our unique RSS newsdesk allows members to search the feeds of several hundred RSS news channels to find information that might be of interest to share.
  • You can search by category or full text and better still, when you've gotten results back you can share the story with a single click!
  • If there is a news organization whose RSS feed you think we should include, please tell us here.

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And everything can have a geographic locale too

  • If you're writing a list of great restaurants in your neighborhood, it would get lost on most sites because they're blind to geography.
  • On CityTools, you can assign stories to neighborhoods, cities, regions, states, countries -- wherever. And, because of the way our geographic model works, when you assgin a story to a place, anyone selecting a higher level place can see it too. Assign that list to a neighborhood and anyone looking for content in the surrounding city will see it too.
  • Our database covers virtually every location of note in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom and Australia. In addition it includes ever country of the world and, in may instances, major cities in a country. So if you're writing a travel story about Paris, you can assign it there and whenevere someone searches on Parisan travel -- or travel in France - they'll find your story.
  • That's right, we're providing localized citizen journalism and social news at the local level across the majority of the English speaking world. We figure we might as well start with some ambition, wink, wink. Local coverage of Ireland and New Zealand coming soon! And by the summer even more as local language versions roll out on our platform....
  • All this localization will really matter by late spring when our products for mobile devices hit... But don't bother right now because the existing site is pretty unfriendly to mobile users. That will soon change, however.

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return to the main public features overview
Tips!
click on an item below for more info

Where can I find information on the publisher's network?

The features overview can be found here.

If you're interested in the Howtos and quick guides -- including the 15-minute fast track guide -- to using the networks, you can find that here

Where can I find out about features of the free CityTools public tools?

The overview page can be found here

The howtos for teams, writing stories and lists may be found on the menu rail under "Docs and Howtos."

I've got to have this! Where do I sign up?

We were hoping you'd ask that!

You can sign up for an individual account here which is free for everyone.

If you want to sign up for our paid publisher services you may do so here, but you need to sign up for an individual account first.