A pair of entrepreneurs behind a new network of mobile-friendly hyperlocal websites is aiming to recruit up to 50 journalists.
Billed as “a simple way to find local news on your phone or tablet,” the Borde.rs app has now been up and running for around a year.
It aims to use the exact GPS location of your iPhone or iPad to collect hyperlocal stories from the web, and other borde.rs users, to create a completely “personalized” newspaper.
Now its inventors want to create a network of hyperlocal mobile sites and recruit a set of at least 50 writers and journalists to populate them with quality content.
The app was originally devised by, and is the brainchild of, company founder Jasper Westaway, a software engineer who previously worked for Reuters.
Borde.rs is Jasper’s third company start up. The first was bought from him by Microsoft.
He told HoldtheFrontPage: “While it would be lovely, in an ideal world, to envisage borde.rs eventually becoming as popular, or as big, or as global as say, Facebook or Twitter, at the moment that is something we can really only dream about.
“We can’t really predict where our journey will take us long term, as the app is a living, breathing thing which is constantly evolving and developing week by week.
“Currently the app is free to download, and we don’t ever envisage charging for it to be downloaded. The aim is to ‘deconstruct’ local news, and bring it to people in a totally different format, and to do that in ‘real time’ in the future, which is something we are working on just at the moment.
“From a commercial point of view, we aim to form ‘business partnerships’ with other companies in order to provide some of our content, like Zoopla and ebay, for instance, rather than charging people for links from their website to ours, or to advertise with us.”
Jasper and his business partner Rob Sanders will now be advertising on HoldtheFrontPage for writers to work on the project.
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An interesting project. Good luck.
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Bit like Pinterest then, or Huff Post, but without the quality content. Think it’s trying to squeeze blood out of a stone, but you never know.
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Successful hyperlocals have a local personality which attracts and retains their audience, who are people with a stake in the locality (live there, work there etc). This project appears simply to present an extract of local news from a national database based on where you happen to be at the time, whilst disintermediating the genuine local titles. It’s an interesting experiment, but it’s not a hyperlocal in the full sense at all.
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What kind of salary bands and job prospects are here? Would a young starter get a career out of it? Online seems so vague and unquantifiable, but that may be just Minim’s 18th century view of quill work.
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Thanks for the coverage & comments.
The challenge has been to go from no publishers or readers on the app, to creating a feedback loop where every new user generates more. We evolve the product on a weekly basis. While we haven’t decoded the entire DNA of the problem of local news in the modern news ecosystem, we move constantly closer.
Working with existing content is one angle of attack. But we now have enough users that we want to bring higher quality, original content. That role is unlikely to look exactly like a traditional journalist. It is more likely to be journalist, editor, community manager and local evangelist that is able to create a more intimate, relevant experience for readers.
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“Decoded the entire DNA…”. ” …news ecosystem …”. ” …angle of attack …”. ” …local evangelist …”. “… intimate, relevant experience for readers.”
Kill me now.
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Will it create a “relevant experience” for the writers’ bank accounts?
Or is that were the “evangelical” side of it comes in?
Hard work being its own reward, like.
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Well, if it’s anything like the print industry nowadays, bluestringer, you will paid wages that someone with no qualifications would laugh at, and have to wait a good three years before earning what a supervisor in a supermarket might get.
An entry level bin man’s wage is what I aspire to at the moment. Can this venture offer me this crazy, crazy dream?
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interesting project – terrible name with one of those silly new domains that will never catch on.
.co.uk or nothing!
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I’m looking forward to reading Jasper and Rob’s job ads on this site and am intrigued by the proposed working hours, location, employment rights, desired experience, and, crucially, rates of pay and career opportunities. People here have mocked the glib digi-speak and it does seem like the usual tripe spouted by chancers sicnce time immemorial (your chance to come back hard here, lads). Also, as a journalist, I am curious about Rob’s first start-up “bought by Microsoft”. This sounds mightily impressive, so how much hard cash did it realise? And why weren’t any details published in the report? Surely a verifiable and quantifiable success story would give the project much-needed kudos in a business where they’re notoriously hard to earn. Over to Jasper and Rob – and a real place where you can be contacted.
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