The San Francisco Chronicle’s website, SFgate.com, launched a Bay Area business and restaurant user review section today, powered by CityVoter -- a service which hosts local guides and reviews. The new section is called Baylist, and it already has about 1,100 business indexed. However, Bay Area readers will have to wait till August 4th to start reviewing and voting.
A newspaper teaming up with an Internet service to provide content is nothing new. But since then, the newspaper market has seen much rougher times and might be leaning harder on such cooperation to find new sources of revenue.
Many newspapers are slowly dismantling many critic-based sections, often under the financial strain of maintaining a paper losing millions of dollars. The San Francisco Chronicle is no exception -- it was forced to lay off 25% of its newsroom staff in a desperate attempt to cut massive financial losses. It has been reported that the Chronicle is losing as much as 1 million dollars per week. However, the website and newspaper brand still has the advantage of drawing as many as 4 million readers per month according to Quantcast. More internet services like CityVoter might see newspaper websites as a great place to feature their product online. It will be interesting to see if a newspaper’s ability to draw readers combined with useful regional internet services like CityVoter will produce profits for the ailing newspaper business. These sections may help local advertising find an audience online.
As for SFgate.com’s staff-written food review section, it still remains on the site and is not yet linked to the new user review section.
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