A large corporate giant moved into Capitol Hill’s local media space this morning. KOMO television has launched its Capitol Hill News site as part of a citywide rollout of neighborhood news sites run by a central staff with contributions from the station’s reporters, producers and any other company employees Fisher Communications can throw at Seattle’s neighborhoods.
Their launch day coverage include a historical photograph from the Seattle Muni Archives found on flickr, a promotion for this past Saturday’s Sound Outside music event, and a post about last week’s shooting outside the teen detention center in the Central District. So far, comments on the site are from KOMO employees and the RSS feed isn’t valid XML (fixed now!).
Nope, not official
The KOMO site includes pages for most neighborhoods in Seattle. The move by KOMO comes in the wake of SeattlePI.com launching a ‘neighborhood’ site in Queen Anne to compete with local indie site Queen Anne View.
Here is a CHS Links page of the latest from KOMO’s Capitol Hill site. Corporate, indie — you can get it all at CHS.
I just checked it. Validates with two warnings.
let me know when you successfully add to your feed reader
… almost weird, except, it is a sour challenge to local media already on the beat. Go away KOMO.
Their list of recent stories (Dick’s pot bust, design review meeting, etc) reads eerily like a recap of CHS posts from the last week or so. Isn’t that remarkable!
I’m sure they’ll find their pace :) Though my analytics do show a few downloads of graphics from posts about upcoming events from a Fisher IP address. That’s not cool.
Yeah, their posts seem awfully…derivative. I hope they find their own stuff to cover and stop scooping off CHS.
They called me and tried charging me $200 a month to advertise on their site. Why would I shell out that kind of cash when I’m getting such a good deal (and good response) by advertising on CHS?