MizPee.com: Niche, hyper-local journalism about top toilets
Founded by veterans of the mobile industry, MizPee provides user reviews and locations of toilets (news you can use) in numerous cities.
Once you’ve settled upon your spot, you can use the same site to browse product deals (let’s call it consumer news) in the area.
MizPee is one of several inventions of YoJo Mobile, which describes itself as a “a pioneer in targeted location-based services.”
There is a lot of room to provide other types of information to users of this service. I wonder if Outside.in will partner with MizPee.
Opportunities this presents
Web sites as niche-knowledge service providers helping their customers solve specific problems will continue to proliferate and present opportunities for journalists to:
- Edit, verify and enhance user-submitted information
- Provide original, related information, and summaries and links of related, extant information
But that will work only if journalists start thinking of themselves as providers of journalistic services, not just providers of stories (though that manner of organizing information is a service), to any number of customers (not just readers/viewers/listeners) seeking to work with information.
Yeah, not so romantic: “Hey, where’s my pee profile?!?!?” the editor roared.
But it’s not entirely silly.
New information customers
Niche service sites create a task-oriented customers who may need more than tools to accomplish a goal — they may need (and need it fast) the information enabling them to accomplish their task in the best way possible.
That’s valuable data. Who’s providing it?
