NYC.is, Curated by NYC

This morning, we stumbled upon what appears to be the first New York-centric news aggregation Web site that leaves homepage curation up to readers.

Taking a cue from social news sites like Digg and Reddit, NYC.is lets users share city-specific links and vote them up or down to determine how much promotion they get. As of this posting, some popular front-page topics included a New York Post article about absent City Council members, a Grist.org item about hawks on the Upper West Side, and a New York Times story—uploaded, we might add, by Jennifer 8. Lee! —about a Mexican restaurant in Corona, Queens. 

“I like the dynamism and the eclecticism. The fact that you get an interesting mix of local content,” said Ms. Lee, speaking strictly as a user of the site. “You get the funky, quirky item about a flood of people dressed like vampires in Brooklyn along with very serious items about things like housing and transportation policy. It would be fascinating to see if the model can be replicated.”

NYC.is was created by Susannah Vila, a 24-year-old political science grad student at Columbia who did stints at The Nation and CBS News after graduating from N.Y.U. in 2007. She launched the site in a private Beta testing phase back in March, and brought it public at the beginning of the summer with some PR help from her friend Simon Owens, a 25-year-old D.C.-based social-media consultant and blogger.

“There are thousands of bloggers and independent reporters writing in and about NYC, but no hub to connect them all,” said Ms. Vila of the impetus behind NYC.is, in an e-mail. “I think my site is the only one connecting all the different small scale bloggers, reporters, or anyone at all who wants to write about his or her community, giving him/her a place to promote their work and network with each other.”

Of course NYC.is has entered what seems like an increasingly saturated hyperlocal news market.

The New York Times has been engaging users with its community-based blogs in Brooklyn. The Huffington Post just launched a New York edition that mixes big city headlines with commentary from local figureheads and citizen journalism/crowd-sourcing experiments. NBC New York (“Locals Only”) is now in beta. That’s to say nothing of the various national sites that provide custom, city-specific aggregation, like Every Block and Outside.in, which just launched a curation tool geared at small, hyperlocal start-ups.

But Ms. Vila said NYC.is fills a niche.

"I hope that the interactivity of NYC.is will lead to a more engaged community, something that is lacking at the national, but hyperlocal, sites such as Outside.in or Topix,” she said.    

So far, a few hundred people have registered on the site, said Ms. Vila. But “the biggest challenge is getting people who have signed up to return and share stories more than once,” she added.

Ms. Vila also said she plans to add a self-publishing platform so users can write and upload their own content, and she’s engaging people to replicate NYC.is in other cities. There’s interest from someone in Sacramento, she said, and a similar site, Windy Citizen, exists in Chicago. (E-mail us if you know of any others!) She said she also plans eventually to sell targeted local ads, although “the priority is really about driving traffic."

Ms. Vila also made reference to recent initiatives to open up city government on the Web.

“There is a lot of great and exciting stuff going on in NYC with regard to making the Internet more available and harnessing it for a more transparent local government,” she said. “I'd like NYC.is to be a part of that.” 

[Thanks to NYConvergence for the tip]