NJL Weekly Roundup

Mark Coddington has posted his "This Week in Review" - topics include USA Today, Twitter, and paywall struggles. Enjoy.

Fwix: Pivoting From Local News To Places

TechCrunch has the scoop:

“We are automating Patch and building richer places pages and city pages,” says CEO Darian Shirazi. With everyone on the Web crazy for Geo and trying to tap into local commerce, places directories are becoming more valuable. (They are also better for SEO). Whereas AOL’s Patch is building out a directory of places in 500 small towns by hand, Fwix is creating an automated directory filled with maps, news feeds, events, photos, reviews, Tweets, status updates, and check-ins.

CEO and Founder Darian Shirazi tweeted earlier that they're getting 40m unique visitors per month. Those are some GREAT numbers...and they only launched 13 months ago. Wow. With that sort of growth, you almost wonder why they're changing. With that said, the local news space is getting crowded, and it looks like they're about to become more dynamic than the rest of the pack.

Neighbortree: New Hyperlocal Startup

Neighbortree, the one month old hyperlocal startup, has raised $120k in angel funding, according to Lost Remote.

Here's how Neighbortree describes themselves:

neighbortree.com provides free neighborhood social networking websites to all types of residential communities. Your neighbortree.com website is 100% FREE - created for residents and run by residents - not run or controlled by your HOA or property manager. And since you create the content, we think your neighborhood should be able to benefit as well! That's right, not only do we share a percentage of our ad revenues with our participating communities, we provide extra incentives when neighborhoods help us recruit advertisement and sponsorship partnerships.

Let's see if they can get the hyperlocal ad model to work... it has had limited success elsewhere so far, but it could just be that advertisers are slow to adopt/try new things.

ReadWriteWeb: iPad Newspapers Ripe For Innovation

ReadWriteWeb has an insightful article on the virtually untouched huge potential iPad newspapers possess:

Just as the iPad has proven to be a boon to magazine publishers, newspapers have flocked to the device too. All of the major western newspapers have an iPad app now: the New York Times, Wall St Journal, BBC News, USA Today, Financial Times, and others. There are also new forms of news services that have arisen based solely on the iPad's touchscreen interaction and multimedia capabilities: Newsy and Flipboard come to mind.

You could change the headline to "iPad Newspapers Are Currently Disappointing".

Will Local News Rivals Kill Paywalls?

Alan D. Mutter of Reflections Of A Newsosaur had a very interesting post today titled "Local news rivals doom publisher paywalls" - it has since been re-published by a variety of other sources, and is sure to scare those paywall advocates who think it's the answer to all their problems.

With a fast-proliferating number of respectable local sites giving away news to build traffic for their ad-supported ventures, newspapers simply won’t be able to charge for access – especially when their own stories are likely to become freely available within minutes at any number of competing sites.

The article focuses on efforts by Yahoo (their $90m acquisition of Associated Content) and AOL (Patch) to compete with publishers by producing content all over the country inexpensively. I have no idea if these content farms will work (maybe Patch is a bit more than a content farm, but still) but they can't help dissuade local newspapers' hopes (in many cases, based on paywalls) for the future.

Intoducing Gawker's Wikileakileaks

It was only a matter of time - here's part of Gawker's post:

It's time to give Wikileaks the Wikileaks treatment—expose it to the same sort of radical transparency it advocates and see what turns up. We've launched Wikileakileaks.org as a place for tipsters to share documents, secrets and rumors relating to any aspect of the organization. Your anonymity will be totally protected if you send in info. And we'll vet whatever we get and post it with commentary. So head on over to Wikileakileaks.org, or email leaks@wikileakileaks.org, and let's open up Wikileaks.

Not that it was that original of a thought, but I had the same idea, so it's good to see someone doing it.

Sarah Hartley: 10 Characteristics of Hyperlocal

Stumbled upon this (not literally) and really enjoyed it... Sarah Hartley (@foodiesarah) posted "10 Characteristics of Hyperlocal" on her blog a couple days ago. Check it out.

I especially liked these three:

1.) Participation from the author. To my mind, this is the biggest single hyperlocal attitude characteristic – the blogger, writer, journalist or whoever it is running the site participates in activities in the community. Includes activity on, and offline.

2.) Opinion blended with facts. Can sometimes be related to point one but generally a less distinctive, more blurry line of difference between what is reported and what is opinion is commonplace. The author’s personal take on an issue can be more pronounced than would be expected in a piece of traditional news journalism.

7.) Independence. The publishers of these sites tend to pride themselves on being independent and see not being answerable to a mainstream organisation meaning they’re able to be more responsive to their community.

Need Help Online? Call Tribune Co.

Continuing the theme of news organizations finding creative ways to boost revenues, Tribune Co. (who filed for bankruptcy protection in December, 2008) is going to help businesses in the digital world, from SEO to social media.

Editor & Publisher:  

The effort, called 435 Digital Services, will carry a staff of 10, some of whom will be reassigned Tribune employees and some will be new hires. The moniker is a nod to the company’s 435 N. Michigan Ave. address.

Avoiding easy jokes like "newspapers should be hiring digital consultants, not doing it themselves," I like this move from the Tribune Co., and I think one of the best ways to learn (or at least reinforce it) is to teach others...so why not continue to evolve and educate themselves while also bringing in revenues? Nice move.

This Week In Review (NJL/Mark Coddington)

Here's the roundup of news in the media biz this week, from Mark Coddington (@markcoddington) at Nieman Journalism Lab... featuring Google's search and social issues, and the stateless "news" organization that everyone now hates, WikiLeaks.

STeals: Star Tribune's Deal Service

PaidContent has the scoop:

The Star Tribune‘s Jason Erdahl tells MinnPost that in launching STeals the paper is betting that it can leverage its existing relationships with local advertisers to “better build deals and integrated sales programs” than the daily deal startups can. He says the newspaper believes it can generate about $500,000 a year from Steals. (We called and e-mailed Erdahl today to get more details but haven’t heard back).

I give credit to the Star Tribune for trying something different revenue-wise. They sensed the Groupon-powered trend and decided this is a way they could legitimately generate sales. We'll see if others follow.