Introducing Crimson News
Howdy! We’re incredibly excited to announce the public release of our first service Crimson News! It’s been an exceptionally long road to get to here, but we’re positively beaming about the opportunities this presents for the BCP as a community and for us as members and staunch supporters of it.
You may or may not be familiar with Crimson News. If you’re not, here’s a quick breakdown of what it entails.
Crimson News is a news aggregator service for the BCP (Bournemouth, Christchurch and Poole). If you’ve not come across the term news aggregator before here’s a quick explanation of what it does.
A news aggregator pulls in news from multiple locations and presents it to a reader in a single place. It solves the problem of having to visit lots of different websites to get the news and information that you want.
On launch we started to pull in articles from over 200 local blogs, business and organisation websites. Our initial pull found over 1,100 articles, of which we’ve selected over 700 for syndicated display on Crimson News.
So, you can now keep up to date with over 200 local organisations and influencers all in one place, and we’re just getting started!
The Reasoning
The main reasoning behind the development and release of our first service, Crimson News, was the fact that we found it so difficult to keep up to speed with everything that is going on in our community. Having all of that news in one place, specific only to the BCP, and clearly organised is a game-changer we think!
Further, we noticed that a lot of great local ideas and initiatives start up, but quickly succumb to failure due to a lack of exposure to their target audience, namely their neighbours! We realised that if we have to use a global media platform (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter et al) to reach the people living next door we’re doing it wrong, and we hope you agree!
We feel this service is extremely necessary because global media platforms now use such convoluted algorithms to determine what we see, that we never really seem to see what we want to any more, only what they want to show us. Even worse, what someone has paid them to show us. Crimson News is very much the opposite. It’s about getting back to basics.
We’re very much hoping to expand our reach and work with as many local organisations, businesses and influencers as we possibly can to help them get their message out there to the people looking for it.
The Structure
If you check out Crimson News, which you can do at www.crimson.news, you’ll see we have just a tiny bit of OCD and decided to organise news into categories. We like the structure and hope you do to.
Our algorithms order those categories according to how many subscribers they have, so there’s no way for you to change that, sorry :(
But wait! Yes there is! See as a registered member, you can pick and choose the categories that go into your news feed, so you only see what you want! Awesome!
Want more? Ok, you can personalise your news (on by default), so that as you read articles from different categories, they will start to rise to the top of your news feed! So if you keep reading articles in Lifestyle it’ll start appearing at the top of your list.
Want more? Ok, categories are the way we organise articles, but the real heroes are the hundreds of bloggers, companies and organisations who write the articles.
You can subscribe to sources, just like you subscribe to categories and their latest articles will appear in your news feed as well.
For Website Owners and Bloggers
If you’re based in the BCP, and or write about the BCP we’re the perfect partner for you. The best way to think of Crimson News is as another channel to increase your exposure and publicity alongside your current social media accounts and mailing lists. We’re not trying to replace those mediums, merely to accentuate them and give your content another platform to reach your target audience.
As we mention, almost too often, we’re local for local. We’re based in the BCP, and we only syndicate news about the BCP. If the community of Bournemouth, Christchurch and Poole is your target market, or forms a part of it, it makes sense to get your content on our platform.
We’re a completely free service. There’s no cost to push your content onto Crimson News and never will be. What makes it even better is that you don’t actually have to do anything.
Once we have your website in our system and we’ve verified we can work with it, we take care of everything. All you have to think about is continuing to create the fantastic content you already do.
As we mentioned at the top of this overly long press release, Crimson News is the first service our organisation Crimson Rocks has opened. We’re constantly updating it and adding new features to improve it as a service.
As a first public release we would very much appreciate your feedback on it if you fancy taking it for a spin. If you find any bugs please do let us know. You can reach out to us via social media platforms at the moment.
Thanks for reading, and we hope you like it!
Crimson Rocks
