Darian Shirazi wrote the code for Fwix, the news aggregation service he founded in October 2008 while on a backpacking trip in Eastern Europe.  Since then, Fwix has rolled out sites in 200 cities in the U.S., Canada, the U.K., Ireland, Australia and New Zealand. They draw a combined 14 million unique visitors and aggregate nearly a million stories a month. A typical Fwix site is a mashup of headlines from local newspapers and magazines, content from the nearest network TV affiliate, posts from neighborhood bloggers and grassroots social media--all based on location.  Shirazi, 23, held engineering internships at Facebook and eBay ( EBAY - news - people ). He founded Fwix with $2.7 million in funding from BlueRun Ventures, which is what pays for his staff of 12 (11 of whom are engineers) at Fwix headquarters in San Francisco. There, new journalism keeps an eye on the old: Fwix's office is directly across the street from the 145-year-old San Francisco Chronicle.  Last month Fwix signed a content partnership with The New York Times Co. ( NYT - news - people ), allowing the NYTimes.com, Boston.com and the Times' 15 regional papers to supplement local news coverage with Fwix content. Fwix says it plans to add another 100 markets to its network by September 2010. Shirazi spoke with Forbes about online news aggregation, how Fwix works and how content producers can make money.  Forbes: You built the prototype for your software while traveling through Croatia, Bosnia and Hungary one summer. Why did you create Fwix on a backpacking trip?  Shirazi: I wrote the programming for Fwix on my laptop, trying to build something that would allow me to know what was happening back home in San Francisco and New York. I was writing code on buses and trains, then as soon as I got Web access I'd test what I built. The first version was terrible. Eventually I got it right.  What does the term Fwix mean, and what does the service actually do?  It really doesn't mean anything. I didn't have a lot of money to spend on a domain name--I needed something short and cost effective. In the simplest terms, what we do is aggregation combined with geolocation and filters. We pull down thousands upon thousands of news sources and blogs, then match them with geography. We publish stories based on the trendiness of the topic, that is, whether people are writing about it in any volume in any given city. It's an unusual mix.  How big a factor do you think Fwix will be in the local newspaper war about to start between The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal in New York City?  I don't really know what that war is going to look like. My hope is that we'll be a big part of it. One project we're involved with is "The Local: East Village," a news site that will be on NYTimes.com, which is headed by Jay Rosen at NYU. It will have a huge amount of content dealing with the life and culture of the East Village.
In its coming battle with The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times has a secret weapon: Fwix.