Publishers often talk about "silos" within organizations, but there are even worse silos outside our organizations.

CityTools provides publishers with a simple way to share stories, photos and classified ads with one another in discrete, fully controlled networks of information.

And because any given publisher might belong to a few separate news networks and a few separate classified networks, every site becomes utterly unique!

Your readers benefit from all the extra content that you bring to them, your advertisers benefit from expanded reach.

Publishers can create networks that are invisible to everyone but other members, or create networks that other publishers see in the hopes of discovering new relationships and opportunities.

And that's at the core of it -- if you're a CityTools publisher and you encounter another one, you'll know they understand the benefits of sharing and creating smart networks. We want to help you make those connections.

Everyone knows that publishers are having a hard time today -- why go it alone? Your audience wants more, your advertisers want more, CityTools helps you to provide that.

Some existing classified sites -- you know the big ones we're talking about, no reason to name names -- are all about massive vertical integration.

They want you to dump all of your recruitment or auto or real estate ads into one big new destination. And they want you to point to their uber brand sitting on top of yours.

To which we say: why?

The point of aggregation is to give readers a sufficient mass of information and to provide advertisers with enough eyeballs.

But just dumping everything in a single big dumb bit-bucket doesn't make sense. If you live in Boston and you have to filter our real estate from Miami, you're not well served.

At CityTools we have a different model -- we move all classifieds and news around the edge of the network, like a file sharing system. This as some technical advantages, which we'll touch on later.

Out approach has several simple advantages: the content is on your site, with your look and feel and with your navigation. And you control all the branding (we don't even require publishers to use a "powered by CityTools" line, although if you want to, you may, wink, wink.)

And unlike central aggregation, by putting the content in your hands, you get a palette of "colors" to use to make great new things. Your way!

Rob Curley from the Washington Post says, "I think of CityTools as the 'unassociated press' because it gives us the benefit of a wire service while allowing us all to be utterly unique.' "

Some systems require you to make massive changes to work with them. We endeavor to be as simple as possible.

Your existing front end system should be able to work with ours out of the box and the files you get back are importable in virtually all publishing systems and ALL major databases.

During our testing, the typical amount of time needed by systems people to fully set up for CityTools was less than an hour. Often, with a crack system team, less than 20 minutes. To make it easier, we provide scripts and cookbooks to solve common problems.

CityTools accepts uploads in a variety of formats -- CSV, XML, Morris Communications classified ad formats (we're big fans of Morris products), pipe delimited, tab delimited -- and this means that about 95% of all systems out there can create files that can be uploaded to us.

We provide files back to you as XML, CSV, pipe delimited and RSS -- yes, you get a free RSS feed out of this! And that means that nearly any system can read files in from CityTools.

While daily operations are fully automatic, if you want to create or manage networks we provide a simple web based console to permit that. It's designed to be run by non-technical people.

All of this means that you can begin enjoying the benefits of CityTools content almost immediately.

You can use CityTools smart networks to move news stories, classified ads, photos and, using some of our cookbook solutions, even banner ads and "top ads" content.

Again, your imagination is all that's required...

We're the solution to the commodification of the news and we think we're part of the solution.

A little of this, a little of that, a spark of creativity and suddenly, you've got wildly original products that couldn't be delivered before.

Imagine being an editor and deciding -- because your audience needs it -- that you want to create an agricultural network. You contact five other publishers who belong to CityTools and within minutes you're moving you agricultural content amongst each other. All of your readers benefit.

The next day, you decide to call a different set of publishers to share content about small businesses, and again, within hours your readers can find a specialized small business "wire service" on your site (or in your paper).

And while all members share content, every member has a unique view of the content. This is a powerful weapon against commodification of the news.

Or, let's say you're a classified manager in Florida and you want to create a statewide network of boats.

It's not the kind of thing that you might imagine before, but with CityTools it's so easy that creating specialized, regionally significant verticals is fun. And profitable.

By allowing publishers to aggregate into "smart networks" they can bring meaningful value to advertisers.

With existing aggregation solutions everything gets dumped into a single giant bucket and the reader has to sort things out.

With CityTools, that's never the case.

Imagine this scenario -- a string of West Coast publishers -- small newspapers all -- band together to create a special network just for California Coastal property.

With existing all or nothing solutions, something like this would be unthinkable. With CityTools, it's easy.

Now suddenly in each of their local markets the newspapers can sell advertisers the value of a smart, regionally significant network. For readers, they get the focus and understanding of the newspapers.

Imagine being a reader in New York thinking about buying a vacation home on the California Coast. Would you rather wade through 10,000 unnecessary listings or would you prefer a specific, focused site with exactly what you're looking for?

CityTools allows publisher to combine forces in creative ways to aggregate markets to benefit their readers and advertisers. And that means more sales and more readers!

The CityTools service pricing is designed to encourage creativity.

For a single flat rate (currently $659 per month if paid by credit card auto renewal and $750 per month if paid by invoice) publishers may create and participate in as many news and classified networks as they want.

We don't charge extra fees beyond the flat rate. This allows you to dive in and try as many things as possible. Experiment. Go wild. We're here to help.

Look, we all know that in an era of newspaper cutbacks, it's getting harder to give your readers things they want.

We can help.

Because of our structure and low cost, we empower publishers to share freely with each other.

Suddenly it becomes practical to serve reades who otherwise you might not be able to serve. Few newspapers have the ability to run full fledged book review sections any more -- but they all have a few book reviews. With CityTools creating a book network takes just a few minutes.

Or, even if you do a great job now in a specific content area your audience might want more. By pooling resources with other publishers, everyone wins.

CityTools currently offers English language citizen journalism services -- at the local level -- in the US, United Kingdom, Canada and Australia. And we offer English language support at the national level everywhere else in the world.

Shortly after launch, we'll add the ability for the public to post classifieds to the site as well.

Publishers who subscribe to CityTools have the ability to pull down as any news story CityTools members (and staff) submit to the public networks.

Adn on the classified side, ALL classifieds posted on CityTools will be made available to publishers to post online or even print if they choose.

Since any subscribing publisher can offer the full feed from CityTools, it's guaranteed that the publisher site will always be deeper that CityTools. Who loves ya, baby...

When you get into circulating news and classieds across the network, you have to be able map disparate categories to each other.

For example, one publisher might have a category for snowmobiles and another might want all snow mobiles in "sports vehicles."

With CityTools, mapping amongst these categories is easy -- in fact, we've designed the interface to be used by editors and classified managers withou the involvment of the IT staff.

OK, imagine that you and your chief competitor have joined the same network.

You both want to be able to provide content from the other memers of the network, but you don't want the competitor to get your content.

Because of our network controls, you can block other publisher from seeing your content, or ignore their content with a simple mouse click.

And once it's done, you never have to worry about it again.

We're proud of what we've done here, but we're all media people and we HATE the way companies are always trying to leech the mojo from an established publishing brand.

We don't do that. You don't have to mention CityTools for any paid service. No where.

We do have a couple of free things that some publishers might be interested in that require the "powered by CityTools" line, but if you pay us, we're here to support you.

Citizen journalism is an exciting thing and the braintrust behind CityTools has been involved in this realm since 1995.

Obviously, we believe heavily in it. After all, we've launched a global platform for local citizen journalism.

However, nothing will replace the value of trained, professional and imparital journalist doing their job. For that you need publishers...

OK, enough with the opinions, here are the facts. Many publishers are interested in citizen journalism but don't have the technical means to provide such services.

For that, we've got a solution. Any writer on CityTools has the option to move their work to the public publishers network, where any subscribing publsiher may review the content and use it.

In this way, we hope to make supporting citizen journalism easier and more palatable for publishers.