|| Author: James Johnson|Tags: ,

KQED Public Radio Teams Up With Huffington Post San Francisco And HyperLocal News Provider J-Lab

Huffington Post San Francisco

San Francisco’s KQED public radio has announced a new partnership with Huffington Post San Francisco that will give the radio network the ability to feature the sites content on their radio shows and station website. The station has also announced a partnership with four hyperlocal news outlets that are part of J-Lab’s Networked Journalism Project, those sites include BerkeleysideOakland LocalNeighborWebSJ, and SF Public Press.

Under their partnerships KQED will feature stories from those partners via the KQED’s news site and on-the-air. For their part the station will train reports and bloggers to act as on-air personalities when reporting the news.

Bruce Koon, KQED’s news director told  of Harvard’s Neiman Journalism Lab:

“One of the new realizations in the journalism world today is this notion that the ability for single institutions to do it all has been threatened considerably,” while he went on to add, “We’re a regional news entity that serves the area broadly, in terms of the nine-county Bay Area. We can’t get deep into neighborhoods necessarily, but that’s what a lot of these new emerging news sites and blogs are doing. Is there a model in which we can help surface and distribute the kind of great journalism they’re beginning to do to a wider audience?”

When dealing with J-Labs KQED hired a half-time community news coordinator, Molly Samuel, who is responsible for flagging stories that deserve extra attention, flagged stories are then pitched to the KQED staff during their morning news meeting.

The company’s deal with HuffPost may strike some people as even more bizarre than the J-Labs agreement as it’s based on a handshake deal which came together in just one months time. For the HuffPost agreement the organizations will share content, however it’s based on a “whatever comes along” agreement. As part of that handshake agreement the HuffPost can post stories from KQED’s popular food blog,  Bay Area Bites, either in whole or in part, which will then require them to “owe” a link based on unknown variables.

What do you think about KQED’s partnerships with Huffington Post and J-Lab’s hyper local offers?