The Los Angeles Times has struck a deal with Mixx.com to take an equity stake in the company and has integrated the Mixx social media tools at Latimes.com.
This new alliance between the Los Angeles Times Media Group and Mixx is an an online content and co-marketing alliance that allows LATimes.com users control their own personal “Mixx” blend of online news, information, photos and videos. The La Times has taken a small equity stake in Mixx. The details of the LA Times’ equity stake were not disclosed.
Mixx.com was launched in October 2007 and was created and designed by a team of industry veterans. The founders have deep Internet, news publishing, and online content expertise and some are former executives from Yahoo!, AOL, USA TODAY, and The Associated Press.
Mixx allows you to discover “personally relevant” media–and interact within networks that you create. Your network can consist of friends, colleagues and people who share your common interests. With this new alliance with the LA Times, if you’re a Latimes.com reader, you now have direct access to Mixx’s networking and personalization tools through integrated functionality on story pages. In addition, cross-promotional traffic will be maximized by optimization of LA Times content for searches from within the Mixx site.
Mixx is also offering LAtimes.com readers tools to help harness and organize internet news, information, and multimedia content. You click through to the Mixx site from Los Angeles Times story pages can submit items directly to Mixx without any requirement for registration. To do this, look at the bottom of articles on the LA Times site they’ve added the Mixx icon to the list of social media icons that you can click to submit to the appropriate social bookmarking site:
You can quickly search and browse through content from Southern California and throughout the world. Upon registration for a free Mixx account, you can expand your social networking and bookmarking options by creating and participating in public and private groups. You can also network with other Mixx users who share your interests or even people who live near you. You can also join the discussion by commenting about items you find interesting, and by voting for or against news, images and videos that you like or dislike.
On November 24, 2007, an unexpected surge of users began flocking from Digg.com to Mixx.com and this surge continues.
The Los Angeles Times is the largest metropolitan daily newspaper in the country, with a daily readership of 2.2 million and 3.2 million on Sunday. The Los Angeles Times and its media businesses and affiliates — including latimes.com, The Envelope, Times Community Newspapers, Hoy, and California Community News — reach approximately 8.1 million or 62% of all adults in the Southern California marketplace.
The Pulitzer Prize-winning Los Angeles Times, has been covering Southern California for over 125 years and is part of Tribune Company (NYSE:TRB), one of the country’s leading media companies with businesses in publishing, the Internet and broadcasting.
Mixx is owned by Recommended Reading, Inc., a privately-held company based in McLean, Virginia, dedicated to connecting users and publishers in an ever more crowded digital media environment. Mixx is a customizable social media website that empowers both users and publishers of mass market content with an unprecedented blend of user-recommended media, online social networking and comprehensive personalization tools. It is built on a fundamentally different structure that allows publishers to drive highly qualified traffic to their sites while transforming their audiences into grassroots evangelists. Mixx users engage in an intuitive, threaded experience as a result of their participation in community activities around topics they define, and creation of their own interest-based start pages with customized content submission and delivery.
There’s actually a lot of other sites talking about the LA Times and Mixx, take a look at what they’re saying:
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