UWIRE has started the climb back to the top of college content-sharing services. After abruptly disappearing six months ago, the Web site plans to re-launch tomorrow (April 1).
“Our main focus to start with is to get back to the core of the business, which is the wire service, to really have the best content available and slowly grow outward from that into other areas,” said Tom Orr, UWIRE supervisor and general manager of Palestra.net, UWIRE’s partner site.
UWIRE is an online wire service founded in 1994 that aggregates college newspaper content to share with college and professional news organizations.
While the reasons for UWIRE’s departure are kept under wraps, Palestra.net CEO Joe Weasel said on collegemediamatters.com that the hiatus resulted from a “directional change” involving Palestra partner Fox “that happened rather quickly and it happened in such a way that we were left with very few options…”
By decreasing the costs to run the business, keeping its 800 members and planning to start new partnerships, Orr said UWIRE is positioning itself to be back in the lead of the college content-sharing market.
“We really do regret what happened and how it happened, but ultimately I think it helped us make the changes that we needed to make to be a better company today,” Orr said.
To read more about how content-sharing organizations like UWIRE, the College News Network, and the Huffington Post College could affect college journalism, check out the upcoming Spring 2010 issue of the SPLC Report magazine.