August 2010Hyperlocal journalism: print’s hyperlink to new-age challenge Dr Navneet Anand
In his book ‘The Vanishing Newspaper’ Philip Meyer had prophesised, and interestingly very pointedly, that by first quarter of the year 2043 newspaper would die in America when ‘the last exhausted reader tosses aside the last crumpled edition.’ We may yet be remotely away from that possibility but the scare does lead to a loud reminder: newspapers are beginning to lose ground beneath and very rapidly so. One of the foremost reasons for this shrinking story has been the rapidly evolving internet and newspapers have been acutely aware of it. They have been devising tools and strategies to challenge the threat of the internet and the rise of hyperlocal journalism has been one of the loudest manifestations of it. As the term implies, hyperlocal journalism refers to the act of collecting and publishing stories which are extremely local in nature and in the conventional form of the profession would be dubbed as trivial. What’s fascinating, and worth critical pondering, is that even the biggest of them all including New York Times and Washington Post are resorting to it. You and news Sethu Subramanian The rise of citizen journalism With a plethora of news channels cropping up in the last few years in India, channels tried to come up with innovations to score points over their rivals. One of those innovations was citizen journalism; introduced in the hope of getting a fresh perspective on interesting news stories, seen through the eyes of a non-professional journalist (who was just another viewer) for other viewers. The concept existed even earlier when we had our newspapers asking readers to submit articles about events that happened in the city. Can local news production be centralised? APN, Australia’s regional media group, has its strength in the unique local content of its newspapers and websites. Why this came to be and how it was implemented...the article says it all Peter Owen
Zones and esditions Zoning plays a key role in delivering local news effectively. An insight into how the process can be implemented in your newsroom M Vedanayagam
Need for Zoning: The U. S. based Gannett Research study says that “Local news consistently gets high ratings on the reader-interest scale. Reader focus groups say that local news is one of their primary reasons for reading news paper.’’ The salvation of ‘community’ news How Fwix is trying to aggregate hyperlocal news under one umbrella... Two years ago, 22-year-old Darian Shirazi made a jaw dropping move. He dropped out of the philosophy program at U-C, Berkeley, to start Fwix a little over a year ago, simply because – in his own words - “I no longer could find out what was going on in my own city (San Francisco).” As the Fwix tag line goes, it helps you follow your city! Keep up with your favorite local topics, events, and places in real time. With this site, you have access to the latest local news stories from local sources and validated user-contributed content. Basically, fwix filters and find the best local information on blogs, news sites, and social media sites. For this to work in real time, David and his team use coding software like Python, C and java to source local content and tag it all under one city .
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Sumana Khan
The author works as a mainframes programmer in Chennai for an investment firm
This unique case study includes business elements (cost-cutting, re organisation, planning of new products), editorial aspects (editors' training, newsroom organisation) and a strong technology dimension (choice and implementation of a CMS system). Its newspapers are now produced from one centralised newsroom, using a single-database editorial system. The shift provides not only economies of scale, but also much improved products and more efficient handling of multimedia. 
The Concept: 
It is a known fact that today newspaper industry is in turmoil. The decline of newspaper industry is severely affecting channels of local news reporting. This fall gave an opportunity for bloggers and community-driven news sites to give news consumers their ‘local’ news. 
