Ripple wants to deliver local news — and it wants your help writing it

The internet is a good place to learn lots of things. What’s happening in your neighborhood is not one of them: Efforts to create sites that deliver local news have largely fallen flat, and have for a very long time (see: Patch).

That doesn’t deter Razmig Hovaghimian. He’s building a local news service, and he thinks you and your neighbors will help him out.

Hovaghimian's Ripple.co, which launches out of beta today, describes itself as a “city-focused news platform powered by local journalists and storytellers.”

In English: It’s a site and mobile app dedicated to big cities including San Francisco, New York, London and Bangkok, featuring a location-sensitive newsfeed stocked with stories that come from other local news sites — or from a volunteer group of contributors who want to write about their own neighborhood.

“People want their voices heard,” Hovaghimian said. “They want to be representing their neighborhood.”

Ripple

Hovaghimian’s last gig was building Viki, a sort of international version of Hulu. He sold Viki to Japanese e-commerce giant Rakuten for $200 million in 2013 and then stayed on at Rakuten for another year.

Viki relied on free labor — a volunteer army of translators who helped caption their favorite shows in 100 different languages. Hovaghimian figures the same ethos will compel people to write about what’s happening down the street. Eventually, he says, he’ll be able to share revenue, likely from ads, with his top producers.

“There’s so much great content out there,” he said. “Everyone has a story.”

But relying on free local content — even in neighborhoods soaked with wired residents who have the time and inclination to type up things happening in their vicinity — generally means you’re only going to get a certain kind of local content.

Hovaghimian is augmenting his feeds with news made by other local news orgs, but my hunch is that he’s going to have a hard time finding enough compelling stuff to draw readers on a consistent basis.

He will have some time to figure that out, though, courtesy of $4 million in funding. Investors include Rakuten, Greylock Partners, Graph Ventures, Social Capital, Charles River Ventures and the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.

This article originally appeared on Recode.net.

Will you support Vox’s explanatory journalism?

Most news outlets make their money through advertising or subscriptions. But when it comes to what we’re trying to do at Vox, there are a couple of big issues with relying on ads and subscriptions to keep the lights on:

First, advertising dollars go up and down with the economy. We often only know a few months out what our advertising revenue will be, which makes it hard to plan ahead.

Second, we’re not in the subscriptions business. Vox is here to help everyone understand the complex issues shaping the world — not just the people who can afford to pay for a subscription. We believe that’s an important part of building a more equal society. And we can’t do that if we have a paywall.

So even though advertising is still our biggest source of revenue, we also seek grants and reader support. (And no matter how our work is funded, we have strict guidelines on editorial independence.)

If you also believe that everyone deserves access to trusted high-quality information, will you make a gift to Vox today? Any amount helps.

One-Time Monthly Annual

$5/month

$10/month

$25/month

$50/month

Other

$

Yes, I'll give $5/month

Yes, I'll give $5/month

We accept credit card, Apple Pay, and Google Pay. You can also contribute via