CityTools, LLC announces the commercial availability of the nation's first “social network” for news and classifieds. Simple and cost-effective, the service permits publishers to create – or join – networks to share news stories or aggregate classified advertising.

“Our goal is to provide publishers with fresh, creative ways of combining news and classifieds. We give publishers the opportunity to create their own wire services for news that can be defined as narrowly or widely as publishers choose,” said Robert Cauthorn, CEO of CityTools.

“This is true for classifieds as well. Imagine what a classified wire service can look like -- based region or classification -- well it's here, " Cauthorn said. Using CityTools, publishers may create vertical classified networks confined to a single category or as broad as the entire classified universe. "We think any publication, regardless of size, can become a significant aggregator by working with others,” Cauthorn said.

Unlike other services, CityTools does not require publishers to drive traffic to an external site where other branding and business goals exist.

Instead, the content moves directly to the newspapers themselves so they can package it as they choose. In this respect, a CityTools network looks like a file-sharing network for newspapers.

“I think the ideas behind CityTools are huge, “ said Rob Curley, vice president of product development at Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive. “What they've developed is incredibly powerful and while it's impossible to say what it might mean for the industry, the vision could spark a revolution."

Curley and The Washington Post are noted for delivering some of the most creative products in online news – and encouraging such creativity is a central mission of CityTools. “Rather than asking publishers to send traffic off their sites, we want to help them bring traffic in. It's their content, their vision and publishers should enjoy the benefits of their hard work, ” Cauthorn said.

Publishers control all aspects of the distribution of their content via an easy web interface. The controls are so robust that two neighboring competitors may participate in the same network without having their content appear on each other's sites. CityTools has been designed to easily work with the vast majority of newspapers' editorial and advertising front ends and it scales from a small weekly newspaper right up to major metropolitan dailies.
The interface also encourages publishers to discover unexpected relationship with other publishers.

“CityTools allows publishers to generate the benefits of aggregating news and classifieds without any of the drawbacks,” Cauthorn said. “How you brand it, how you present it, who you participate with is up to you. It can be for print, for online, for both. Free or paid, or both – anything publishers want. Publishers always have complete authority over their content and networks.”

For a single, fixed monthly fee (as low as $650 per month) publishers may create or participate in as many news and classified networks as they choose. There is no requirement for annual contracts.

“By bringing together content from many other publications in many networks each newspaper becomes utterly unique, “ Cauthorn said. “This is exactly the opposite of the commodification of news happening elsewhere. Normal wire services look the same everywhere. We reject that notion of sameness. A publisher might have a collection of sports from one network, car classifieds from another, education stories from a third. And as a result, each publication is unique and each may focus entirely on the needs of readers and advertisers. ”

“By aggregating news content from specialty networks and like-minded publishers your readers win and by the same token, you win,” Cauthorn said. “And by aggregating markets, your advertisers win as well. Can a solution exist where everyone benefits? We think so.”

Sean Fitzpatrick, director of digital media for Wick Communications, a family owned community news company with 38 newspapers, says of CityTools: “The CityTools vision of sharing is an important one. It's hard to wrap your head around all the ways CityTools can benefit your organization. We're in the process of deciding how many, and where, we'll use the tool set. Potentially, it can touch every part of our organizations.”

Because each publisher in a given network might have different classifications that don't tie to another publication's, CityTools network manager provides an easy interface for mapping categories between disparate categories of information.

Beyond moving stories and classifieds through the network, CityTools offers “cookbooks” to show non-technical staff at a publishing company how to create other kinds of networks: e.g. photo networks or banner advertising networks.

There also is a direct-to-the-consumer side of CityTools which provides, among other things, services for citizen journalism and, later this month, free online classifieds. A simple gateway exists so that publishers who subscribe to CityTools may pull down as much, or as little, of this public content as they like.

More information may be obtained by visiting http://www.citytools.net/howto/features/rosetta_overview.html or by sending an e-mail to info@citytools.net