BBC's latest foray into local

Yesterday the BBC launched its latest venture in the local media space, the Manchester blog.  You can see from a blog post by one its creators that the site, while (unsurprisingly) spartan this soon after the launch, is intended to become a gateway to local user-generated content (text blogs, but also rich media such as Flickr streams and YouTube videos) from people in the Manchester area.

To some extent this is the next logical step from the BBC's Moreover deal linking out from the main news site to relevant external stories, and highly reminiscent of Boston.com's long-running RedSox blog gateway.  The strategy in a nutshell:

"Yes, it's that thing I keep going on and on about: a media organisation going oustide it's doors to proactively embrace members of the audience, and the stuff they create and publish online without building the infrastructure, claiming ownership over the content, or taking on the various legal, editorial and technical risks usually associated with "online community" and "citizen journalism".

And so...the BBC is setting itself up as a distribution (and, tacitly, validation) gateway for local content. It's an interesting and powerful position to be in.