City Pages Launches 'Twin Cities Reader'
By AAN Staff
june 18, 2009 11:23 am
The Reader, named for the Twin Cities alt-weekly that closed in 1997, is a local news aggregator being developed as a separate entity from the paper's Blotter blog. "This is it's own product, and it's meant to be a hub for finding the most important stories in the Twin Cities quickly," City Pages editor Kevin Hoffman tells AAN News in an email. "Whereas Blotter is highly voice driven, this is more like a map where the reader decides where to visit." The Reader apes the look of the notorious Drudge Report, a move Hoffman says was intentional. "The Drudge Report has long been the top national aggregator online, even for people who don't agree with Drudge's politics," he says. "We think that this is the format that people are used to for aggregators, and wanted to do something similar for local news."