Static online reprints of newspaper and magazine articles is so ten years ago. Interactivity and networking are the big factors now, as people want to leave their mark in comments on the stories of today.

Topix went beyond aggregation today by launching the ability for local news readers to post or comment upon stories.  CEO Rich Skrenta describes the business model transformation where they took more risk to turn SEO attention into participation — sharing control to create value.

Topix, the local news aggregator that is owned by several big U.S. newspaper chains (Gannett, The Tribune and McClatchy), is doing what amounts to a relaunch of the site and adding “citizen journalism” or social media to the mix, as well as moving to a dot-com domain (it used to be dot-net). Founder and CEO Rich Skrenta — who describes on his personal blog how this came out of an attempt to “de-suckify” the site — has a blog post at Topix about the changes, and says:

The news aggregating site at Topix.net has a new complementary domain at Topix.com, and a renewed focus on the local audience that CEO Rich Skrenta thinks can be a difference maker for the site. Oh, and just call them Topix.

USA Today has the scoop on Topix.com’s (no longer .net) new initiative to encourage the general public to post news and reports from their local community.

The WSJ’s Kevin Delaney, provides a broad overview of the issues web site owners face when switching their web site from one domain to another – usually via a 301 redirect. The story focuses on Topix.net…

After paying $1 million to purchase the rights to the Topix.com domain, Topix.net CEO Rich Skrenta now has to deal with a couple of daily realities in the search world: changing domains could cause a dropoff in search engine-driven traffic, and Google isn’t exactly Nordstrom or L.L. Bean when it comes to customer service.

Rich Skrenta of Topix.net thinks that the time has come where local community will drive Topix to greater heights, and that community-driven content merits re-organizing the site to emphasize it.

Gannett, Tribune, and McClatchy have reworked their ownership percentages of online classifieds site CareerBuilder, the Topix.net news aggregator, and the ShopLocal.com search engine.

Within the local news search at Topix.net, visitors will see local classified ads on the right side of the page and an invitation to post a free ad themselves.

Topix sales and marketing VP Chris Tolles disclosed the agreement with the Associated Press to help connect users to topical stories.

It’s not enough that marketers/PR pros know what’s being said about clients/brands.

I am “feed up” with news sites that don’t offer quality RSS feeds.

Topix.net, a news aggregation site and a CooperKatz client, today unleashed not only a new design but a bunch of new features.

Search results on Topix now include blog results, and the site said blog posts should show up in the index and on the site within 3 minutes of being crawled.