About Hoodline
Hoodline powers local content discovery, within a 0.2 mile radius of where you are, through their machine-learning platform. They add dozens of pieces of metadata to contextualize content from 300+ publication partners, and turn the best data signals from technology data partners into automated local content. Hoodline currently uses the Wordsmith platform to transform data from tech companies like Yelp and Zumper into local stories for tech platforms and news outlet affiliates including Yahoo, ABC, Eventbrite, and Digital First Media.
Local News and Content Gaps
Hoodline understands the impact that local media coverage has on growing and strengthening communities. Through technology and partnerships, Hoodline is building the ‘nearby button’ of the internet and powering local content discovery. Aniket Aranake, Data Scientist at Hoodline, sums up their core mission through the scenario of “if you’re standing at a particular point and you or your phone know your latitude and longitude coordinates, you should be able to ask ‘what’s happening immediately around me’ and have Hoodline provide good answers to that question.”
What they’ve found through their work, however, is that local journalism and news outlets are facing challenges with funding and resources for generating content. “There really are more gaps than there aren’t gaps in local news right now,” said Rose Garrett, Managing Editor at Hoodline. “We quickly realized we needed to start creating a lot of our own content across a wide geography, which led us to Wordsmith.”