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New-Media Expansions
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Two new-media organizations in Fairfax County are widening their reach.
Backfence , a Vienna company that has built a network of community Web sites featuring reader-generated content and community chats, has launched a new site in Evanston, Ill., near Chicago. It is the company's first site outside the Washington and San Francisco areas. Backfence also plans to add sites in Skokie and Arlington Heights, Ill., before the end of the year.
Backfence, which includes hyper-local coverage of communities and free classifieds, launched its first sites in McLean and Reston in May 2005 and received $3 million in venture capital funding last October.
Meanwhile, two local media analysts have joined forces to create an organization that aims to explore the relationship among the media, technology and society, specifically focusing on how user-generated content is changing the media industry.
Andrew Nachison and Dale Peskin, former directors of the Media Center at the American Press Institute in Reston, have formed iFOCOS, the Institute for the Connected Society . The Reston organization is affiliated with the Integrated Media Systems Center at the University of Southern California.
The board of advisers for iFOCOS has many pioneers in new media, including Craig Newmark, founder of Craigslist , and Susan Mernit, product manager for Yahoo Personals . The idea is to start a conversation among leaders in the technology and media fields, said Gloria Pan, director of communications for the new organization.
"If you stay isolated in your own niche, you're never going to understand where the industry is headed," she said.
Kim Hart can be reached athartk@washpost.com.
