Thoughts on 9Neighbors

In my Reinventing the News class today, we were introduced to 9Neighbors, a news aggregation Web site that sorts its links by readers comments for Boston and the surrounding towns of Cambridge, Newton and Somerville.

Having the site sorted by the highest ranked story brings to light some of the quirkier links rather than the most important or newsworthy. To solve this, there should at least be an option (if not the default option) to have the posts sorted by newsworthiness as determined by an editor rather than the masses. That said, if the site is going for a slice of life approach, it works well as is.

Interestingly, as one digs deeper into the site and delves into specific categories, one obtains varied perspectives that shed more light on an incident than a traditional news account does. For example, under the Central Square section, the top three links (as of Monday afternoon) involve a pedestrian accident that happened this morning. One is the traditional news account, the other a first person perspective and the third is a post from Universal Hub that links to the other two (and provides a neat virtual image of the intersection through Google Map’s Street View, but that is a topic for another day). Being able to access these varying viewpoints on the same incident from one platform is an incredible resource.

At the same time, though, the Central Square page raises a key issue. The headlines of two of the links contain different facts - that the person is dead or just critically injured. Without a timestamp, it is unclear whether the person was injured and subsequently died or if both sites have conflicting information until digging deeper. This is a perfect place for someone at 9Neighbors to write an in-house blurb with the latest information.

So, as a slice of life, community networking Web site, 9Neighbors is wonderful. But, there is nothing that would make more inclined to read it instead of the Cambridge Chronicle’s Wicked Local site for Cambridge news. I might, however, turn to it to access first person perspectives sometimes not linked to on traditional news sites.