Bloom
Bloom helps local publishers more effectively engage with their community by making content accessible through location-based channels. The Global Editors Network asked us a few questions for their Startups For News competition, ahead of the fifth pitch battle we will be taking part in this week. To vote for Bloom, please do it here.
GEN: What problem are you solving?
Bloom: Local news content has an accessibility problem. Residents, tourists, businesses, and software applications are eager to read and analyze content by location, but they cannot easily gather this content in real-time. This has dramatically decreased readership and engagement in local newsrooms, leading small and large publishers to abandon local reporting in their communities.
What is the solution you are offering?
Our platform enables publishers to geotag content with a specific geographic location based on where the story took place. Our services aggregate the geotagged content and distribute a personalized feed of stories to local residents, businesses, and software. We’re working closely with local publishers to find these new distribution channels in their neighborhood and present their content on interactive maps, mobile applications, and community-based websites.
List 3 reasons why you are better than your competitors
- Our team thoroughly reviews and verifies publishers before they’re able to work with Bloom. This eliminates the problem of fake news on the platform and builds stronger trust with communities that the publisher’s serve.
- Our geotagging process uses precise geographic data that is manually confirmed by the publisher to ensure story’s location is accurate. Other services use automated geotagging or hashtags that have proven to be unreliable.
- We don’t restrict content to be displayed only to Bloom’s website, rather encourage other websites and software to query and embed the publisher’s local content as well. We make sure the publisher maintains full control of their branding and content’s presence as it is distributed to these third-party services.
How does your company make money?
We charge businesses to use our content aggregation services. The money is shared between Bloom and the publishers who contribute to that local distribution channel. For example, if a community-based mobile application uses Bloom to aggregate local news, that business’s payment is put towards enhancing Bloom’s service and towards supporting the newsrooms who contributed that local news.
What are your next steps?
Our geotagging tools and embeddable plugins are available right now on our website and as a Wordpress plugin. We are currently testing pilot projects for our aggregation service and plan to launch the service later this year. Furthermore, we are experimenting with how Bloom can personalize and distribute local content to email newsletters in a similar manner.
