Tribune to Launch "Chicago Now"

Tribune is gearing up for the launch of a new web site called "Chicago Now." Tribune is billing this as "Huffington Post meets Facebook for Chicago." It will feature the "best bloggers in Chicago" and, apparently, some sort of social networking platform. It "will not rely on traditional display advertising," but will generate revenue through e-commerce, "sponsorships," "advertorials" and "other creative advertising solutions."

Tribune is saying that there's "nothing like" Chicago Now, which was "first conceived" in December 2008, but the idea of a blog network is not exactly new. Tribune says that, to date, "no other media company has created anything like Chicago Now," but that's apparently not counting the Huffington Post as a media company for its local news effort in Chicago. It's also not clear what Tribune means by saying that the site will "steal [market] share from the likes of Yahoo and Google."

In all, however, this is a very promising experiment. I've been supporting the idea of newspapers hosting blog networks, and this appears to be the first large-scale implementation of that. Trying to generate revenue outside of display ads is an inspired plan, since it's clear that web display ads will not support local newsgathering for the foreseeable future. And adding a dynamic community (a.k.a.: social networking) component to the site could help multiply its page views several fold, and keep readers from retreating to sites like digg and Fark to discuss articles.

There are several important unanswered questions here:

• What sort of e-commerce will the site engage in? What's being sold? Will it try to act as a middleman between readers and local merchants?
• How are the contributors being paid? Sharing revenue generated by their blogs? A negotiated fee? Or not at all (perhaps giving bloggers the option of hosting Google ads)?
• Will contributors receive enough compensation to keep them blogging? Will the site generate enough revenue to sustain itself?