Outside of the conference hall were teams of these guys wearing Topix.com shirts / computers. Clearly this was some hype for the new launch where they are inviting people to write about local issues and they were asking people what they wanted, but weren't getting from local newspapers. Jay Goldman responded "nudity" which the guy noted and may have caused this result. Since local and user generated content are two things I have a bit of an interest in I moved in definitely wanted to hear how they were pitching the idea to the man on the street, so to speak.

Initially the guy wearing the computer was saying something about "what if just anyone could write about local news and allow other people to read it?" to which I responded, "you mean like on blogs?" but that didn't seem to register with him at all. I let him finish his clearly scripted lines about why the internet is better than print and then followed up with my question.

Me: "So you are talking about people being able to write about local issues on their own rather than relying on the existing old media newspapers to do the job, right?"

Topix Guy: "Yes, because we've found that people are really not happy with the local coverage they are getting from newspapers"

Me: "So I'm just wondering how you think this relates to, or maybe competes with things like blogs where people are already writing about their local issues online?"

Topix Guy: "Well people don't seem to be too happy with the existing local coverage, and with Topix you don't have to pay for it like a newspaper and it's free for everyone online."

Me: "Right, online and free. Gotcha. But I'm what I'm getting at is that there are already a lot of people online providing much better local coverage than their existing newspapers and I'm just curious how Topix will relate to those folks who are already online doing this?"

Topix Guy: "Well people aren't happy with newspapers so we're going to let people write whatever they want and it will be free online."

Me: "Um, OK. Thanks"

Moral of this story - if you are going to have people on the street pitching your product to people walking by it might not be a bad idea to give them more than one canned answer to work with, and maybe give them a heads up about people who are already doing things which might be considered related.

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