Breaking Promos puts small business in spotlight

As part of our increased focus on affordable and innovative advertising vehicles, The Bakersfield Californian has launched Breaking Promos, a Twitterlike tool that connects our audiences directly to small-business advertisers. 

Breaking Promos launched Monday on Bakersfield.com, and we're working to roll the feature out to rest rest of our sites on The Bakersfield.com Network. 

The think Breaking Promos ticker scrolls deals across the bottom of local websites. The concept is simple: Local businesses can log into our self-serve system using their Twitter handle, buy digital tokens that can be redeemed as 140-character promotional posts, or so-called Breaking Promos. Those Breaking Promos go live in the Twitterstream but more importantly appear in a ticker that scrolls at the bottom of our websites.

Click to read more ...

Publish2's News Exchange offers great promise for journalists

I'm happy to be among the beta testers for Publish2's News Exchange, which was formally announced to the world today at TechCrunch Disrupt.

After using News Exchange for a few days -- and quite a bit today -- I can safely say it brings a whole new mindset to how media organizations can share, pursue and purchase content. I've worked with Associated Press content and tools since I was a college student in the 1980s and my first impressions of News Exchange last week were, "Wow, this is a game changer."

News Exchange is a simple but powerful rethinking of traditional content-sharing networks like The Associated PressThe Associated Press ought to be very worried because the News Exchange tools, while rough in spots, have the possibility of being a very powerful yet much less expensive alternative to more traditional services like AP. In short, Publish2 sees News Exchange as a better, livelier and cheaper middleman between media providers and customers.

Click to read more ...