Topix raises $15 million more to build out local news

Updated

Topix.net, the Palo Alto company that aggregates news on a single site, letting users see local and other relevant news to them, said it has raised $15 million more in financing.

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Topix said in a statement that it raised its money from existing backers Gannett, McClatchy Company and Tribune Company.

Topix.net serves 32,500 local news communities, and has been busy introducing new features, such as online forums tied to local news. They also introduced an interactive feature that lets you select news from over the past year related to a term. For example, Saddam Hussein was just sentenced to hang, and if you search for Saddam you will get a fever chart of how much Saddam was in the news over the past year. You’ll see it spike this weekend. You can interact by clicking on the time bar.

With this investment, Gannett and Tribune each own a 33.7 percent stake in Topix.net, while McClatchy owns 11.9 percent, the company said. (See here for the history of the earlier investment in Topix).

Here is our previous coverage of Topix.

Update: VentureWire reports that the pre-money valuation of company was a respectable $72 million. The Web site saw 3.9 million unique visitors in September 2006, according to Comscore, up from 3.6 million during the same period last year.