When I was at The Times, a few of us had this idea, trying to capitalize on everyone’s belief that focusing on local news is the way for a newspaper to survive. Since everyone lives in a neighborhood, why not use that for the beats? Make sure everyone has a laptop which can handle the reporting as well as any video / photo editing that needs to happen as well as a camera which can also do video.

Editors should lay down the law that anyone seen in the office more than once a week would be in serious trouble. Instead, they should be talking to local businesses about what’s going on, interviewing local high school athletes and becoming a known entity at all city meetings. This would allow for local stories to be reported on in a much different way. Blogs could be started for cities that would become must-reads for everyone involved. A few times a week, have blog entries reverse-published into the print edition but overall make everything focused on the Web.

Would this work? Would this save a newspaper? Who knows but really at this point, what do they have to lose?

Would it be such a terrible thing? If newspapers were managed by new groups of people with no real romantic link to the glory days of newspapers, and freed from management grown fat and lazy on the easy profits of the glory days of American local newspapers maybe titles can innovate again and start thinking about how they serve audiences better in print and online rather than arguing about trivial details of the content of dying Monday to Friday newspapers or creating unreadable wrappers for supermarket inserts on Sundays.

[ via ]

• The Las Vegas Sun’s weather page. Extremely clean design with lots of data but easy to read and understand unlike ours.
• EveryBlock is now in LA… Watch out.
• Simple Update Protocol looks like a mix between a cache and sending out Pub-Sub notifications.
• The Onion has invaded Chicago.
• The Blueberry Mint Lemonade from Lemonade is absolutely amazing.
• LED Football for the iPhone.
• Fumblerooski is a perfect compliment to the start of college football.
• Looking forward to trying the Nickel Diner

Chrys Wu has a look at the site plus an interview of sorts with Ben Welsh, my co-worker and brother-in-arms with the Cubs.

Times database developer Ben Welsh says the project was a way for him to learn how to navigate through Los Angeles’ complex bureaucracy.

Welsh moved to L.A. from Washington, D.C. several months ago. “When I got here, I knew that learning how many cities make up L.A. County and how the different services get managed was going to be something I needed to get skilled at, so I thought: I need kind of a test case,” he says. The dog names database became his experiment.

The first step was to figure out which offices held the records, then to request the information in accordance with the California Public Records Act. To avoid being turned down for privacy concerns, “I made sure in my earliest communications with people, kind of the first round, to say I don’t want the address of the owner, but I do want their ZIP code,” Welsh says.

First is to open the archives, with permalinks on every story in the database. Newspapers hold more of their communities’ histories and all other media put together, yet they hoard it behind a paywall that produces pathetic revenues and keeps people in the communities from using it — as they would all the time — as part of their current lives. The revenues would go up with targeted search and keyword-specific ads on those pages, I’m absolutely convinced. But an equally important result would be to strengthen local ties.

Oh, you mean something like this?

LinkedIn will power the NYTimes.com customized headline feature with the five latest Times articles relevant to LinkedIn members based on non-personally identifiable attributes. For example, LinkedIn members who work in the energy sector will have the option to get relevant, targeted Times stories that cover the energy business.

The interesting thing is the personalization aspect. There is shared data between the two which allows specific headlines to be shown. I do think that personalization could be a great way for newspapers to bubble new and interesting content to users. Something like that would bring people back again and again.

I was re-reading Matt Waite’s post on molten data and then read about NPR releasing an API for parts of their content. The two seem linked.

I know the East Coast Times is working on some sort of API but I’ve been thinking about how we could open things up and allow folks access to so much of our good stuff. Why not start with just articles, using dates, keywords or writers as the inputs. Moving on from there, you could add photos, video and then more of our data apps. That seems pretty straightforward to me.

But in journalism, it’s time for a change–big change. As you might have heard, this newspaper, along with virtually every other paper in the country, is under siege. Our whole business model is in free fall–circulation is dropping, profits are down and lots of talented people are losing their jobs. We can moan and groan about it or we can try something new.

That’s the idea behind launching the Big Picture blog. As much as I’ve loved writing a once-a-week column, the world of entertainment and pop culture is moving so fast that it’s become impossible to keep up with all the action without weighing in more often than once a week. Over the past few years, I’ve found myself addicted to reading blogs. The best ones offer a wonderfully brainy, personal and irreverent way of seeing the world. You’ll see the paper now has 40-plus blogs, with more being launched all the time.

My guess is that someday soon our blogs will be the backbone of the paper. Journalists have discovered, to our chagrin, that information is everywhere these days. But readers still crave informed analysis and lively writing, which is something we can focus on as newspapers make the transition from mass circulation entities to niche-oriented publications. So while I’ve got lots to learn about the blogging life–and will surely stumble many times along the way–I’m eager to be a part of that new conversation.