Starting local (non-English) news portal, where to get free content? Paid content at reasonable price?

If you don't want to consider writing the content on your own, you can always hire a virtual assistant or a content writer. Copying your content from another site won't make your business grow. Some writers charge per hour or per article, and on a per month basis if you are hiring a virtual assistant. Prices per article may cost from as little as $2 up to $10. If you are paying per hour, it could be $2-$6 per hour. Hiring a virtual assistant costs as little as $200, depending on the country. If you are going to write english articles, you can always hire Filipino or Indian writers. Hiring a native english speaker is quite expensive. Filipino writers are more expensive than Indian but in more demand. You can check it on http://www.odesk.com or http://www.onlinejobs.ph.

If you don't know any relevant news sites for your niche have you considered you might be in the wrong niche?

Most news is circular, so the first location is going to be your competitors and sites in similar but not identical niches. Just take a look at any newspaper site you will often find "first reported in xxxx" style comments in articles before they spin their own take.

The second location would be the larger news outlets, Guardian, NYT etc

Third directly to source Reuters, Associated Press, Press release sites

Once your site has grown to a point where you are considered an authority you can always ask for direct submissions, paying for exclusives etc.

Ultimately if you reach the point where you are hiring journalists they will have their own contacts and ways to gather stories.

For Photos their are several specialist photo journalism out there, for example Getty and general stock image sites.

With the rise of social media it's not hard to find news in virtually any niche the key is of course verifying the story.

From my experience of editing a number of news sites in the UK and writing thousands of business articles myself, you will only have a successful site if you produce your own engaging and unique content.

You can pay peanuts and get loads of unreadable content, or reproduce existing content which will deliver you a duplicate content penalty on Google...

There are no short cuts to creating a sticky content site (i.e. one which readers will want to visit again and again).

Best of luck though, Jake.

What french content are you looking for? France, North Africa, Africa, Canada? It depends. I would go with basics.

BBC http://www.bbc.co.uk/afrique/ has RSS feed in every language and every subsection. In the past I did this for my company and we research each country, found the top new sites, sought their RSS feeds that are ok for that purpose and then use them to aggregate and present to your customers.

You do need to credit the source on the URL.

Another trick you could use is to use on the fly translation service from Google, which could give an OK quality if the news source you believe is really good and there is no french equivalent for it..

In all cases, always ask permission form the site you are taking the feed from if it is not stated that it is ok to aggregate news.

-- Adonis