Now that many traditional local-news providers such as newspapers and TV news are producing less local coverage and not serving their communities as well as in the past (an inevitable result of recent years’ shrinking of editorial staff), there’s nevertheless more local news and information available to a city’s residents than ever before. You just have to work hard at finding it, online — and perhaps expand old notions of what is “local news” by accepting additional kinds of sources than you’ve been accustomed to.

Identifying what’s available among various digital sources beyond the usual suspects in the city of Boulder, Colorado, and its surrounding towns is part of the Slices of Boulder project being conducted this summer by the Digital Media Test Kitchen in collaboration with Eqentia, a Toronto-based technology company that offers a semantic publishing and distribution platform utilizing text-mining, the real-time web, semantic extraction, social media engagement, detailed aggregation, and rich curation.

Sample of a Boulder real-time news “slice” containing multiple local and filtered non-local sources

With CU-Boulder project team members Sandra Fish and Jenny Dean of CU’s School of Journalism & Mass Communication, and Eqentia founder and CEO William Mougayar, hard at work, an update on their progress is due.

One of the significant tasks in this project is identifying the many local-news and -information sources online that cover the Boulder area. It’s a fascinating exercise, since the end result will give us a point-in-time snapshot of Boulder’s digital media-scape in mid 2010.

As the project continues, and the local-news-and-info aggregation online service that results is updated as new local sources emerge and some existing ones shut down, over time we will get a clear picture of the evolution of digital media sources in this university town of more than 100,00 residents.

Boulder is a technology-industry hub with a well-educated populace, thus it’s a likely place for digital-information innovation and growth. As the Slices’ team research has discovered, there’s a wide range of online sources available to keep Boulder citizens informed — many of them started within the last year or two.

(Of course, there’s not the quantity of online news and information innovation in Boulder as in some larger cities such as Seattle, where a thriving local and neighborhood news online start-up community is filling gaps left by failing legacy news media. Seattle lost one of its two major daily newspapers, the Post-Intelligencer, in 2009; the P-I lives on as a much smaller online-only news operation.)

As a preview to the upcoming final results of the Slices of Boulder project, here’s an early glimpse (a small sampling) of some of the online news and information sources now available to inform Boulder residents. It’s an indicator of the local digital media environment broadening to new types of news and information sources.

The list below just scratches the surface of what’s available online in the Boulder area. I’ve color-highlighted those sources that are purely digital media (i.e., no affiliated print editions, TV or radio programs).

We’ll publish more details about the Slices of Boulder initiative as work on the project progresses. An aggregator Web site of Boulder’s digital news and information sources is expected to be operational by late summer or early fall 2010.

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