Today I discovered ESPN Local, which aggregates stories from across the Web, organizing them by sport. A quick survey of the site reveals that most of those sources are traditional, hometown newspapers.
Because I live in the Tampa Bay area, I first chose the Tampa Bay Buccaneers Local News, which brought up a page of stories from Tampabay.com (the St. Petersburg Times‘ site), TBO.com, Lakeland Ledger, WTSP-TV and Naples Daily News.
Major League Baseball is in season, so the Tampa Bay Rays page currently has an even more eclectic array of sources, including the Edmonton Sun, Kansas City Star, Bradenton Herald, TwinCities.com, Desert Sun, The Stuart News, MLB.com, The Oregonian, Fanball and Detroit News.
Each link includes both the headline and lede graf from each source. It seems like a win for both ESPN Local and the aggregated sites that get the benefit of ESPN Local’s traffic.
And the value for fans is clear: Instead of having to add umpteen sites to an RSS feed, they can go to one site that has already done the aggregation and see every story at a glance.
