Search results matching tag 'Huffingtonpost'

Newsweek scores sexist own goal with Sarah Palin cover

255762 — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 09:40:00 GMT

Newsweek clearly wanted to make Sarah Palin look at bit of an idiot with its cover that some are calling sexist, but it looks to have had the reverse affect and is whipping up support for the Republican from Alaska who shoots stuff and is looking to run for president in 2012.

Newsweek apparently wants to get this unelectable photogenic woman elected and, oh yeah, help promote her new book 'Going Rogue' along the way. The book was the reason for the cover in the first place, which Newsweek is covering in the shape of two essays including one by Christopher Hitchens (who has already warned the liberal left that it might not be "entirely wise to patronize her"). The book is certainly going to be a best seller as Palin "sets the record straight".

The funny thing it is a legitimate cover shot…just it was part of a photo shoot that Palin did for Runners World (yes this woman loves to run). Newsweek used it without that magazine's permission (naughty). But the funniest thing is listening to the paper thin explanation by Newsweek editor Jon Meacham. This is genius. I want to meet the man who talks like this. He should do stand-up.

"We chose the most interesting image available to us to illustrate the theme of the cover, which is what we always try to do. We apply the same test to photographs of any public figure, male or female: does the image convey what we are saying? That is a gender-neutral standard."

Did he say that with a straight face? Awesome. I mean come on. The most interesting image available? The Theme? Was the theme show some leg and show the most inappropriate image available to demonstrate that this woman can't possible be fit for office? You've got them rolling in the aisles Jon.

There are plenty of people arguing that the shot is not sexist including Tina Brown and others who point out that we have previously seen Bill Clinton and Barrack Obama looking toned and shirtless. But to argue this is the same is churlish. Showing powerful men looking athletic is one thing. Yes they have sex appeal, but it does not detract from their ability to run the country. Quite the opposite. The Palin cover shoot is another matter entirely and is part of a long tradition of demeaning women by using revealing shots to undermine them.

Palin might not be fit for office, but she has a lot of support and it is growing with this latest publicity blitz and her appearance on Oprah. On Facebook she has a million plus fans where she writes: "The Runner's World magazine one-page profile for which this photo was taken was all about health and fitness - a subject to which I am devoted and which is critically important to this nation. The out-of-context Newsweek approach is sexist and oh-so-expected by now. If anyone can learn anything from it: it shows why you shouldn't judge a book by its cover, gender, or colour of skin."

There is the question why she was doing revealing shots like this in the first place (even for Runners World), but this question has fallen by the wayside as the blowback from this story does her more good than the harm than the "liberal" media mag intended.

Interestingly, I think there are certain parallels with Gordon Brown in the UK last week. Where the rightwing douche bags at the Sun bullied and belittled Brown. Only to have it blowback in their faces.

Newsweek is engaged in similar tactics, but as Taylor Marsh writes on the Huffington Post the difference is that Palin's people don’t care.

"Oh, and by the way, for all you fact checking fanatics, the people behind Sarah don't care, aren't listening, don't trust the criticism. Norah O'Donnell was in Michigan, another battleground state on Sarah Palin's Going Rogue tour, to see first hand the evidence. Here's a very rough transcript of part of what she said today on MSNBC: 'This is a line that stretches all the way back... another 1,000 people to see Sarah... It's 9:00 o'clock in the morning and she's not here until 6:00 pm tonight.... [...] You know what it is? It's a connection. ... Palin says she's treated unfairly, treated unfairly by the media, by Newsweek magazine ...and the people in middle America feel treated.. unfairly'."

Taylor adds that this is dangerous stuff. People will get outraged and almost inevitably that outrage will go somewhere.

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A Huffington Post for Europe

255762 — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 11:21:00 GMT

A Huffington Post style start-up news site is up and running in Germany with plans later for an English version apparently in the pipeline.

Techcrunch reports that German Web 2.0 figure Lukasz Gadowski, who was previously behind online t-shirt firm Spreadshirt.com, is one of those behind online publishing venture that is going to be a kind of Huffington Post in Europe.

It's called The European. Yes, the same name used by Robert Maxwell for his newspaper way back when, which was later revised and died several times under Andrew Neil and the Telegraph Group's Press Holdings. The last incarnation of that was when Neil relaunched The European as a website. It didn’t last long. That was, of course, way before blogging.

Techcrunch reports that the site has/will have more than 20 journalists and possible contributions from the likes of European Commission President José Manuel Barroso, German car producers association’s president Matthias Wissmann or bishop Margot Käßmann.

Chief editor Alexander Görlach, who holds 50% of the company alongside Gadowski, reveals traffic is rising (from first day numbers of "5,000 readers and 30,000 page impressions") and that first month revenues are three times bigger than originally scheduled in the business plan.

The Huffington Post CEO Eric Hippeau recently said in an interview that it had ruled out European versions despite being approached: "It's not an international strategy, almost every week some pretty big organization would like to partner with us,” Hippeau said.

The UK is its biggest market and it is surprising that no one has tried a Huffington Post here (and they have ruled it out themselves).

Clearly, the market is a lot smaller and a lot of our newspapers have great blogging operations, but that said it feels like there is a gap there for an uber blog or two.

Unless after the demise of the likes of Shiny Media and other blogging operations there really is no money out there for what could be an expensive blogging operation to start-up.

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Game changer: Facebook Connect

255762 — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 13:52:00 GMT

More evidence if you needed it of how powerful Facebook Connect can be from HuffingtonPost.com, which has used it to help recently surpass WashingtonPost.com.

I was looking at it recently as part of our social media strategy and how we might use it and while HuffingtonPost.com is in a league of its own in terms of the vast traffic it generates what it does has important pointers, I think, for others.

While some have queried the of what the Huffington Post has achieved CEO Eric Hippeau in an interview on PaidContent yesterday makes a good case for why it is more than noteworthy.

"It wasn't so much the Washington Post—by the way, it's also the LA Times, it’s also the online edition of the Wall Street Journal. Of the big national newspapers, there’s only two our size that are still bigger than we are: USA Today, which is a very different audience, and the New York Times, which will always be a big brand and very well read and well respected. We’re not in a race with the newspapers. We’re not in a race with anything in particular. Our goal is to establish the brand that defines news and opinion on digital platforms."

And how it did that is interesting, from a political and commentary blog to a pretty much all singing all dancing news site (let's side step the issue of content scraping/oversharing for today), with sport, culture, books and business all being added not to mention its regional editions across the US (Chicago, New York and Denver).

All this is helping it according to comScore hit 6.8m uniques in September. That's up a whopping 50% year on year.

How, in part at least, it has achieve that is through its much talked about Social News with Facebook Connect, which it only implemented in August (Huffington Post and Facebook Go “Social News,” With Connect on Steroids) and allows readers to create a personalised social networking-like news page on the Huffington Post as well as comment and share content easily with Facebook friends.

PaidContent details what Social News with Facebook Connect has meant in terms of those nitty gritty numbers and the numbers are impressive (they're big; always nice): Facebook referral traffic is up 48%; comments jumped to 2.2m from 1.7m in July (15% of HuffPo comments now come from Facebook); and Facebook referrals accounted for 3.5m up 190% percent from June and 500% from January.

Other titbits in the piece are on the international front. HuffPo still has no plans for international expansion outside of serving UK and other European users (the UK accounting for the biggest audiences outside of the US with 305,000 uniques) more appropriate ads, which it is doing via a deal with AdGent007.

"It's not an international strategy, Almost every week some pretty big organization would like to partner with us,” Hippeau said.

Facebook Connect has been described as a game changer by some and the future of journalism by others (take all and digest with a pinch of salt - but not too much).

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Blogs are big business…just not here

255762 — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 10:50:00 GMT

With Shiny Media going into administration yesterday there is a timely piece in the FT today on blogs. Yes, they're big business in the US (its like the FT just noticed), but here start-ups have struggled to replicate the success of the Huffington Post and Gawker. Is the UK simply too small?

We wrote about Shiny Media's fall last night and Lisa Devaney has blogged about it here as well. A real shame to see it fail. Maybe its strategy wasn't all there, it certainly had missteps along the way (like its move into football that resulted in Who Ate All The Pies being put up for sale), but I think the people at Shiny produced some very good work and ultimately it appears to have been a small publisher hit by the recession.

Its woes (I'm guessing) were no different to any other online publisher. There is not enough revenue out there. Not as much as anyone would like to support such a business.

What's clear is that while blogs like the Huffington Post, Talking Points Memo, The Business Insider, Gawker and quite a few more do good business in the US, the UK market appears too small to sustain even quite a compact firm like Shiny.

This is a shame as I often think that media owners don't do blogs very well (The Guardian and a couple of others aside), but there doesn't seem enough advertising oxygen to do them independently and make a living.

Shiny is, of course, not the first UK blog start-up to go down. Glitterdtich closed last year. I don't know what Shiny was getting for its online advertising, but I doubt it was achieving the levels that newspapers are or anything like it.

In the US, as the FT notes, US blogs have hit the level where they are able to charge about what a big US newspaper charges for online advertising. The Business Insider's rate card for instance is up to $30 per 1,000 impressions. Gawker has a rate card CPM of around $50 (of course, it doesn't mean it gets that).

They are also pulling in millions of dollars in venture capital, but here the story is different. The Shiny Media was variously reported to have attracted $4.5m in funding in 2007 from Bright Station Ventures, but apparently the veracity of those reports is not 100%. With co-founder Katie Lee (who left earlier this year) saying: “It was incorrectly reported in the press and we were told to stick with the story. Was mortified.”

Shiny Media's blogs will no doubt continue as the company gets snapped up by someone (at least I hope it does), but it looks unlikely that anyone in the UK is going to be using blogging as a launch pad for anything major any time soon with the way the market is.

But it would be nice to try. It all comes down to the ideas.

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Social media and the Iranian election

255762 — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 10:07:00 GMT

On Wired.com, Andrew Exum is wondering all about Iran and the explosive use of social media to organise, agitate and protest in Iran. He's wondering how real it all is? And if it is the technological enabled few rather than the digitally deprived masses.

He wrote: "Are we simply finding common cause with a technologically-assisted minority and confusing it for a popular movement? One observer of the Moldova protests noticed the way in which we Westerners get fascinated by 'Twitter revolutions' because, hey! We use Twitter too!"

The Wired piece quotes others who are not convinced, but from the pictures it looks bigger than the technological few. The few might have Twitter accounts, but they are it seems being used to organise and bring others together in massive protests.

There is so much going on and a lot of summaries are already around, but here's some of the multitude of links and posts that are coming out of the protests.

#IranElection is the top search term on Twitter which is being used by Iranians to co-ordinate protests and post photos and messages in the wake of the presidential election on Friday.

The opposition reformist candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi is using updates via Twitter and is using it to rally his supporters. One message on Mousavi1388 asks: "Confirmed by BBC Persian, please tell everyone to join them: Mousavi, Karoubi & Khatami will be at the protest. #IranElection"

When it appeared that Twitter was about to shut down for 90 minutes downtime tonight for maintenance, Twitter decided to reschedule the maintenance so the protests could go on.

Mousavi's Twitter feed also made a direct appeal to Twitter: "@twitter Twitter is currently our ONLY way to communicate overnight news in Iran, PLEASE do not take it down. #IranElection"

Yesterday @Mousavi1388 had 7,000 followers on that particular Twitter feed and today it has nearer 10,000. Another Twitter feed @StopAhmadi has more than 7,000 followers. A third feed, @Persiankiwi, has more than 18,000 followers.

The Twitter feed is being used as an unofficial media channel and one that is becoming indispensible for journalists covering the post election story. A tweet this morning, says: "URGNT@ ALL jornlsts, Tday 15:30 Prss Conf. in Tehran, Sadr MotrWay, Kave Shomali Blvd, Roshanayi St, Bahar Shomali St. Num. 9 #IranElection".

Mousavi's Facebook page has more than 53,000 supporters and many Facebook members have posted video while others are trying to persuade fellow Facebook users to change their personal icons to the colour green to show support for the Iranian opposition.

Users on Twitter are also trying to persuade fellow tweeters to change their location to Tehran to make it harder for agents of the interior ministry to track down protesting Iranians.

Blogs are also playing a major role. Iran has always had a large community of bloggers, not least because the number of young people in the country, and many are writing about the protests and like photoblog Tehranlive.org are posting photo updates hourly.

Others are posting images to Flickr and Google's Picasa and making the albums freely available on the web with hundreds of videos being uploaded to YouTube.

A real time feed of images being posted from Iran can be found on PicFog and Twitter users are using the likes of Twitpic to upload their images.

The increasing array of Twitter apps are all playing their role in the protests. Twitter search engine Twazzup is tracking all things Iran-related on Twitter.

Saeed Valadbaygi's 'Revolutionary Road' is one that provides a good source for pulling various coverage of the protests together.

As well as Iranian bloggers international news organisations, including the BBC, which with its Persian service has become a focus for Iranians and widely praised although it was being jammed intermittently over the weekend, and blogs like the Huffington Post, The Atlantic's Andrew Sullivan's blog and the New York Times' The Lede blog are covering the aftermath of the elections in detail.

Others such as the National Iranian American Council is live blogging events blog aggregation site Global Voices has a special section and is translating reports from the Iranian blogosphere.

CNN has not had a good protest. It has come in for some heavy criticism for failing to focus on Iran in depth and thousands used the label CNNfail on Twitter to vent their frustrations. Since then CNN has since ramped up its coverage, but it could be too little too late.

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DailyCaller.com to take on Huffington and Tina Brown

255762 — Fri, 29 May 2009 14:31:00 GMT

Don't know much about former MSNBC and now Fox personality Tucker Carlson, but he launching a site called DailyCaller.com to take on the HuffingtonPost.com and Tina Brown's Daily Beast.

Report earlier this week in the Wall Street Journal that says pundit Carlson will launch a "conservative-leaning news site that will aim to be an answer to the Huffington Post".

"We're sincerely trying to think through what comes next in journalism," Carlson told the paper. "I think we can answer the basic question, which is: How do you keep reporting? How do you make reporting a viable business?"

As well as blog posts, Carlson is promising original reporting: "We don't simply want to be parasites of other news sites. We want to be creators of news."

The site will focus on coverage of President Barack Obama's administration, I'm guessing from a conservative point of view.

But Carlson is no Bush supporting Republican. He has said in the past that he cares deeply about conservative ideas, but he does not care about the success or failure of any political party. And Conservative Republicans have accused Carlson of not being sufficiently conservative

As well as giving the likes of the Huffington Post and thedailybeast.com (for which he has written for and he's a fan of) a run for their money (Carlson described it as a "general interest newspaper") it will also try to outpace the conservative favourite Drudge Report.

There's more on the website TV News Insider including this:

Daily Intel: So, all of the articles about your new project say that you're competing with the Huffington Post. But isn't what you are doing also competing with Tina Brown's Daily Beast, which you sometimes write for?

Tucker: Even if I could, I'd never compete with Tina, both because I love her, and also because I'm not that stupid.

Daily Intel: Says: You love her? (Thinks: Does he mean in a Harold and Maude kind of way? Ew. Don't ask that. You don't want to know the answer.) Says: That's kind of gross.

Tucker: And also true.

Draper and the collateral damage to the blogosphere

255762 — Thu, 07 May 2009 08:16:00 GMT

Not many tears will be shed over the departure of Derek Draper as editor of LabourList, but his exit leaves the Labour Party with a question that can not be easily answered.

The Today Programme this morning called the blogosphere "the Tories' most potent weapon" and it is right, but in a identifying this it also underscored something about the nature of the blogosphere.

The best political blogs are not created by party apparatchiks, by political hacks like Derek Draper who has long had friends in high political places in the Labour Party, but by a collection of individuals outside of party structures and operations.

LabourList, Derek Draper's effort was not always destined to fail, but it might very well do so. Death by association is not an uncommon affliction in political circles in the wake of the Smeargate scandal and the effort to create a blog called The Red Rag to spread malicious stories about Tory politicians.

Look to the United States and Huffington Post on the liberal left or the Drudge Report on the right. Neither of these are organs or creations of the Democrat and Republican parties respectively.

Closer to home, look at Guido Fawkes, the conduit if not the architect of Derek Draper's downfall. He is a blogger of the right, Tory supporting, but sits well outside the party.

Tim Montgomerie's ConservativeHome blog, which Derek Draper looked to when creating LabourList, was not a party creation and has a critical eye when it comes to the Tory Party.

Elsewhere on the left blogs like Harry's Place, have Labour supporters among their ranks, but no more than that.

I am sure that is the reason these blogs have survived and grown.

Derek Draper was always too much the insider. He was not jut an insider, but the insider's insider. A long time wheeler dealer who had been rubbing shoulders with Labour MPs and inner circles from his time as a student stalking NUS conferences.

With all of that access came much baggage and on both occasions it is this that has brought him down, both in this 2009 Smeargate scandal and in 1998 in the Lobbygate scandal where he was caught on tape boasting about how he could sell access to government ministers.

To be successful, scratch that, to be useful to a cause or party that you support it appears to me that it is obligatory to sit outside to be effective and have that necessary sense of perspective.

This does not mean you can not have links and associations with that party or cause. That's all well and good, just don't step into the inner circle.

With an election a year away this incident leaves Labour groping somewhat digitally in the dark lacking the "potent weapon" that the Tories have (I think stumbled upon). This is not a pretty situation to be in.

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When blogs grow up: HuffPo invests, but niggling questions remain

255762 — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 10:51:00 GMT

Big news at the Huffington Post with a $1.75m investment in investigative reporting signalling the continued expansion of blogs beyond linking and comment, but some are also wondering if this is at all connected to the thorny issue of content scraping and possible legal action?

Content scraping is where blogs take an excerpt, usually not toooo much, and link to the original post, but some blogs have recently been accused of whole sale content theft. That's taking not just the odd paragraph, but the the whole article. The Huffington Post is one of those blogs in the firing line.

MinnPost.com for one thinks the $1.75m fund for investigative reporting is window dressing for a site that could be sued for "oversharing others' work".

Oversharing is such a polite way of putting it. You have to wonder how much investigative reporting these ten people will do when some are freelancers and their job description will include short breaking news stories as well as longer pieces?

The alternative weekly the Chicago Reader was one of several papers to recently complain about the Huffington Post's practice of "oversharing".

"The Huffington Post's local 'aggregation wing straight stole our entire Bon Iver Critic's Choice--they didn't ask permission ('read the whole article'? that is the whole article, dumbass). Here's a screen shot since we're obviously about to ask them to take it down."

Film critic Roger Ebert was also a little hacked off with the Huffington Post and vocalised his discontent beneath the offending article:

"I would like to point out that this article rips off my actual article about the incident at rogerebert.com, and by adding all those 'he saids,' destroys the rhythm and form of my prose. Nor does the article even have the decency to link to mine, perhaps because it would be embarrassing to see that HuffPost stole it from me. Nor does it even say where I 'said' these things, but implies I said them to HuffPost. Arriana, I love ya, but this practice is immoral, and HuffPost practices it shamelessly."

Arriana Huffington said in the press release about the investigative fund that it would provide "work and a platform for seasoned journalists downsized by major media outlets", which is all well and good, but Gawker wonders how much experience these people will have in a post headlined 'Arianna Huffington Seeks Young Flunkies' where it reprinted a job ad for a managing editor, which is looking for two years experience in online news and a degree.

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This is not a newspaper website

255762 — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 09:02:00 GMT

A sad day for newspapers as Hearst closes the Seattle Post-Intelligencer and takes it online, but what it plans online, with efforts to create a community title, could be the model for the future.

I blogged last week about the woes of the top 25 US newspapers and how the future is shaping up to become local or hyperlocal with the New York Times joining established community sites.

Now as Hearst today prints the last copy of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer that vision takes on a new impetus.

In its press release, Hearst is quite explicit in its goal of not attempting to transfer a newspaper online, but rather crafting the remnants of it into a new type of digital business serving smaller groups and people and advertisers (a new digital sales team of 20 has been taken on for this task). Possibly even a role for niche paid for content.

The way the New York Times put it was that the Seattlepi.com will more resemble a local Huffington Post more than a traditional newspaper - as the political blog is another that expands locally.

Part of this crafting is about economics pure and simple. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer had 165 editorial staff and the Seattlepi.com will have 20. This will be a mixture of traditional reporters, bloggers and columnists, but those staff writers will be far outnumbered by as many as 150 reader blogs, community data bases and photo galleries.

Those reader blogs will be further supplemented by the blogs and forums that already exist in the community and Hearst made the point that it will be "linking to the great work of other websites and blogs in the community".

The same is true of the New York Times experiment, its community blogs launch into neighbourhoods already well covered by existing blogs.

The community based future of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer is likely to be repeated across America and elsewhere in the coming 18 months as more newspapers go under.

Jeff Jarvis writing in the Guardian yesterday called hyperlocal "the elusive golden fleece" and said it represented a new collaborative, as opposed to competitive, era for local newspapers.

In the case of Seattlepi.com and the experiments of The New York Times, the hope is that by providing the platform readers and community groups will provide much of the content and the impetus to take such hyperlocal projects forward.

This is the end of an era, but what beckons could be a vibrant age of digital community websites, which are different from the newspapers that came before them in how they are produced and how they are consumed.

There are other really interesting experiments taking place that provide pointers to how this community future might look. Nonprofit journalism enterprise MinnPost.com, which describes itself as part of the "new economic model for high-quality local journalism", has launched a drive for microsponsors for one of its most popular sites the BrauBlog. Almost 130 people have donated a total of $2,575, which will be doubled by a matching gift from The Harnisch Foundation.

With so many regional newspapers and jobs going in the UK it s a model that has merit on this side of the Atlantic as well. Almost 60 UK newspapers closed during 2008 and almost 400 jobs have been cut in the last two weeks with 1000 in total gone since last summer.

This led Sly Bailey, chief executive of Trinity Mirror, to today call on the government to relax merger restrictions on regional media groups and allow them to consolidate to obtain sufficient scale, but it might take something more radical than that.

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How US newspapers are failing and the local future

255762 — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 09:33:00 GMT

The stark facts are that of the top 25 US newspapers 21 have seen their circulations fall since 1990 and only four have seen it rise. Most of those falls have been in double digits and 10 have seen it fall by around 40% or more.

Take a look at the list for yourself. The four titles in bold are the only ones to see their circulations rise - in the case of Arizona, the rise there comes from its status as the fastest growing (retirement) state in the Union. This is a list of an endangered species and while you might be able to save the whale it is unlikely that anyone on this planet will save most of these print dinosaurs.

1. Wall street journal :+8.34
2. USA Today +60.64%
3. Los Angeles Times -38.22%
4. New York Times -9.72 %
5. New York Daily News -42.37 %
6. Washington Post -20.22%
7. Chicago Tribune -28.43%
8. Newsday, Long Island 47%.
9. Detroit Free Press -53.12
10. San Francisco Chronicle -39.7
11. Chicago Sun-Times -40.6
12. Boston Globe -37.86
13. New York Post -22.58
14. Detroit News -64.4
15. Newark Star-Ledger -33.59
16. Houston Chronicle +1.41
17. Cleveland Plain Dealer -28.62
18. Miami Herald -49.14
19. Minneapolis Star-Tribune -20.88
20. Dallas Morning news : -14.75
21. St. Louis Post-Dispatch : -37.03
22. Boston Herald -53.33
23. Orange County Register : -33.19
~~24. Rocky Mountain News : -40.26~~
25. Arizona Republic +9.26

Of the list we already know the Rocky Mountain News has closed, with the San Francisco Chronicle in the firing line. The Seattle Post Intelligencer doesn't quite make the top 25, but that is likely to close in days.

Some of the falls are so dramatic pushing 50% plus. In the cases of Motor's city's two papers , Detroit News and the Detroit Free Press, which have lost 660,000 plus copies the future is looking very grim as the US car industry crumbles.

The Miami Herald (down almost 50%) is another. Its current sale around 210,00 is identical to that of the Rocky Mountain News closed by EW Scripps.

The report in Ad Age comes with another in the US mag that asks the question what will replace the crumbling US newspaper market? The industry is casting around looking at ideas (including charging subscriptions/micro payments) and one answer could be (as it appears any solution will involve a patchwork of new ideas rather than one single beam of shiny white saviour type light) some kind of new local digital journalism witnessed by a raft of start-ups.

Last week, the New York Times and a high-ranking Google executive launched rival what are being dubbed "hyperlocal" news websites for communities in the New York and New Jersey area.

The New York Times start-up, The Local, will feature posts by New York Times journalists and community members about everyday life in the neighbourhoods of Clinton Hill and Fort Greene in the borough of Brooklyn, and Maplewood, Millburn and South Orange in New Jersey.

They join the more established like San Diego News Network and in New York Baristanet and Brownstoner.

The Huffington Post has launched its first local site beginning with Chicago and it Is rumoured to be buying local news aggregator Outside.in from founder Steven Johnson following its $25m of funding from a Silicon Valley investment fund at the end of last year.

The idea is not totally new, it has been tried in print before, but the second wave of community focused activity is digital, which with lighter overheads could point to a viable business model. With more regional newspaper jobs going in the UK today, with 150 lost at Northcliffe and Archant's Eastern Daily Press, it is something that has as much relevancy in the UK.

However, whether any of these sites can build sustainable online ad models is the $64,000. Ad Age reports that Brownstoner founder Jonathan Butler laid off his only employee in December when real-estate advertising crumbled.

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My recent blog coverage of the US newspaper crises