New Utah Web site aims to aggregate business news

In partnership with Zions Bank, local entrepreneur LaVarr Webb has launched a new business-oriented Web site, UtahPulse.com, an aggregation of business news from local media sources and business organizations.

For years, Webb has published an online political newsletter, UtahPolicyDaily.com, which aggregates the news of the day related to politics and policy in Utah.

"For some time I've had people tell me they'd like to see a similar kind of publication for business," Webb said.

Zions Bank was one of the organizations that encouraged the project, Webb said, and has provided start-up funding as a sponsor of UtahPulse. As part of the partnership, the site will publish information from the Zions Bank Business Resource Center, as well as from company newsletters and media materials. The site also welcomes other businesses and business organizations to join as partners. Groups such as the Salt Lake Chamber, the Economic Development Corp. of Utah and World Trade Center Utah have already provided content aimed at communicating their specific mission, message and goals.

This corporate sponsorship makes UtahPulse different from business newspapers and magazines that make a point of staying separate from the companies they cover, Webb said.

"This is not a journalistic enterprise in the traditional sense of journalism," he said.

The site will develop very little original content as far as breaking business news in the state, and the journalistic elements on the site will consist mainly of links to news sources, including the business pages of local newspapers.

"We will link to the journalism that is done and we certainly won't edit those sources or screen out things," Webb said. "If another business publication is covering it, what we would do is link to what they're doing."

The site does have a managing editor, Bryan Schott, who will work on aggregating sources, making links and editing the content that comes from partner businesses and organizations. The site also features multimedia audio and video clips of events such as the Zions Bank International Business Conference and the Governor's Economic Summit. Users can download the content to watch or listen to on their computers or iPods, Webb said.

Content on the site will always be free, Webb said, but UtahPulse will need to start generating revenue in the near future. Users will most likely have to subscribe to receive a supplementary e-newsletter, which will come five days a week, and the site also plans to sell advertising space and corporate sponsorships.

"We also expect that we will provide some access to business services that we will charge for," Webb said. For example, people or businesses that use the site to connect with each other would pay a commission to UtahPulse.

The purpose of UtahPulse is to provide consumers looking for business news a one-stop shop, Webb said. It is not that the information people are looking for does not already exist, but that it does not exist all in one place.

"In many markets there are publications like this. Either weekly business journals or the daily newspapers have started Web sites like this that are more robust that just reporting stories," Webb said. "There is a demand, rather than for someone to look through five or six newspapers, they can come here and click on what they're interested in. That's the demand and technology allows us to do that."

The Web site has been live for about a month, Webb said, and improvements will continue to be made. The second phase of the site is set to launch June 9. Concerted marketing efforts will also begin within the next week, and Webb said he thinks the site could easily exceed 20,000 users.

"We think the market out there is pretty big, full of businesspeople who want to know what's going on in the business world," he said.

Copyright Enterprise Business Newspaper Inc. Jun 9, 2008
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