Ping4’s technology is a bit different from the Commercial Mobile Alerts System (CMAS) alerts that began popping up on our smartphones over the last six months. CMAS allows local and national authorities to broadcast alerts theoretically to any subscriber on any carrier, though in practice only a handful of phones in a limited number of cities (though as the GigaOM East office discovered last week Verizon’s New York network and the iPhone are on those lists).

Ping4’s technology is an opt-in technology, requiring the user to download its Ping4alerts! app, available for Android and iOS. While that means only smartphone users with the app can receive alerts, it also gives public safety agencies many more tools in tailoring alerts. The app receives both text and audio alerts as well as multimedia data. For instance, a dangerous weather alert can come embedded with a map of the most high-risk storm zones.

While CMAS can only alert phones connected to the cellular network, Ping4’s system can also send its alerts through Wi-Fi, allowing it to hook tablets into an emergency gird. Its hyper-local geo-fencing technology allows an agency to get very location-specific, targeting, for instance, only devices within a single building. Finally Ping4 allows two-way communications. If an agency sends out an Amber Alert on a missing child, anyone with information could immediately respond to the alert via anonymous text.

Ping4 started working with the Massachusetts Emergency Management Agency in October, just in time to send out severe weather warnings for Superstorm Sandy. The University of New Hampshire also uses the system for campus security alerts and student and faculty mass communications.

The $4 million in funding comes from private investors, not venture capital firms, and Ping4 wouldn’t reveal the identities of its new benefactors. In total, the company said it has raised $7 million from private placements.  It will use those funds to market its service to more emergency agencies and consumers as well as build up its fledgling location-based commerce business. The same hyper-local alerts technology can be used to deliver coupons and ads to consumers, giving Ping4 another tier to its business plan.

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Allon isn’t saying what exactly New York City-based Urban Compass is trying to tackle. That will come around March when he starts rolling out Urban Compass in New York. The website says only that Urban Compass is trying to help people, “make their most important personal decisions.”

But there’s a number of reasons to keep track of what Allon is doing based on his track record, investors and his partner, Goldman Sachs banker Robert Reffkin. And I have a few thoughts on what Allon might be trying to tackle, which I’ll explain later.

Selling to Google and Twitter

First, a little background on Allon and Reffkin. Allon sold his Orion Search Engine to Google in 2006 after starting the project as a PhD student at the University of New South Wales in Sydney. Orion managed to return results on pages that didn’t necessarily relate to a searched keyword, something Google has integrated into its search engine. Allon then launched Julpan, a Microsoft-backed startup that parsed online social activity and surfaced fresh and relevant content to users. After Twitter bought Julpan last year, Allon became the head of Twitter’s New York engineering office and Julpan became the basis for Twitter’s discovery engine.

Six months ago, Allon got together with his friend Robert Reffkin, a banker with Goldman Sachs. The two had met years earlier at a conference when Reffkin was a fellow at the White House. The pair decided to start their own company, combining Allon’s engineering skill with Reffkin’s ability to mobilize people.

In addition to working at Goldman, Reffkin founded the Bronx Success Academy, an elementary charter school in 2006 and also established New York Needs You, a non-profit that provides mentoring to first-generation college students. While a couple stories on Urban Compass have focused on Allon’s credentials, it’s actually Reffkin’s background that might be more telling about the company’s ambitions.

Human-powered network

Allon said the company will be a mix of hardcore engineers in the office but Urban Compass workers on the ground who form a human network. Unlike his previous projects, Allon said the problem he’s tackling can’t be handled through technology alone. It’s something that requires individual workers, who can be called upon instantly, much like taxi drivers. Allon compared Urban Compass to transportation startup Uber, but said his venture will be even more complex.

“Mobilizing people is a big part of it. There are certain people that are needed at certain times. We can make it more efficient and optimize the process,” he said.

He said if all goes well, Urban Compass will be tackling a huge market that hasn’t had much innovation. He believes it could be something that could be worth billions some day. It will initially target big cities but could spread to the entire country at some point. The idea, along with Allon’s resume, has captured the imagination of some big name investors. Goldman Sachs is making its first seed investment in Urban Compass and is joining Founders Fund and Thrive Capital, Ken Chenault, the CEO of American Express and ZocDoc’s CEO Cyrus Massoumi.

Possible education play?

Robert Reffkin, CEO and co-founder Urban Compass

So what exactly is Allon and Reffkin building? My best guess is it’s an education-related startup that provides on demand tutoring or mentoring services. That’s based on Reffkin’s work with Bronx Success Academy and New York Needs You. Reffkin is actually listed as the CEO of Urban Compass and he told me briefly that the company will benefit younger users first.

“In founding a charter school and a non-profit my passion was to build things for New York,” said Reffkin. “Six months ago, we got together to put (Allon’s) engineering talents and my strategy talents together. Our criteria is: what would help a lot of people in New York City and something we could build together. The reason why this is exciting is I believe this will improve the lives of a tremendous number of New Yorkers, particularly younger people.”

Another co-founder for Urban Compass, according to LinkedIn, is Michael Weiss, a former product and strategy guy at Airbnb who previously was a founding member of non-profit Pencils for Promise, which builds schools in the developing world.

If Urban Compass does go after the education market, it’ll have some competition. Companies like InstaEdu and  TutorSpree provide a mix of tutoring and mentoring services.

Hyper-local down to the street level

I’ll be curious to see what spin Allon can add to this idea. He said he was interested in making this a very local service, and he cited some of the innovation that went into Google Street View as one of his inspirations. He said hyper local to him means being everywhere, down to the “apartment level, restaurant level and street level.” Allon said the majority of Urban Compass’ workers will be full-time on the street workers rather than engineers in the office. He said the company’s product will not be mobile first but will be accessed on all kinds of devices though mobile devices will factor heavily in mobilizing Urban Compass’ employees. 

I may be completely off and Urban Compass may turn out to be something other than an education startup or tutoring provider. It could be something broader involving child care. Or it could be a local decision engine, helping people find services and information nearby. That would fit more with the company’s website, which offers visitors these words: “Search. Explore. Decide.”

I’ll be still be interested to see what Allon and Reffkin can come up with. This is a huge amount of seed money for a new startup and with Allon’s track record, there’s a good bet he’s got more good ideas up his sleeve. Also, there are a lot of growing opportunities in local and location-based services, from crowd-sourced employment apps and markets like Gigwalk and Zaarly to more traditional local search and recommendation services like Yelp, Google and Foursquare. We’re still early in the process of bridging the offline and online worlds, something Urban Compass sounds like it could help address.

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The real-estate blog Curbed and its sister food and shopping sites, Eater and Racked appear to be bucking that trend.  The sites, which are owned by Lockhart Steele, cater to local audiences looking for buildings, restaurants or sales. How has he made local pay when others like AOL’s hyper-local network, Patch, have flopped?

“It’s a little counterintuitive. We’re a local company that’s not really interested in local advertising,” says Steele, explaining that the sites’ primary sponsors are national brands with big ad budgets like Ben & Jerry’s or Absolut Vodka.

Steele says big brands use Curbed to tap into local communities of shoppers, foodies or home buyers in different regions. He cites a recent example in which Curbed threw a party in Portland on behalf of Patron Tequila. “We can activate audiences in each of these cities we’re in, and activate a real community.”

Steele says there simply isn’t enough money in local advertising – with one exception. “The one place you can sell local is real estate … It’s the only category of hyper-local that’s really flush with money.”

The Mobile Morass: it’s ok to sit on the sidelines

Publishers are watching with growing consternation as audiences are moving en masse to mobile devices but ad dollars are not. Steele admits he doesn’t know how or when the mobile riddle will be solved but says he is not concerned.

Steele says it’s unrealistic to expect readers to download a publisher’s app unless you offer “non-stop engagement like Netflix” and adds that apps “create another distracting channel that you have to worry about.” He says Curbed is content to watch the mobile experiments of companies like Conde Naste which have been more bullish about apps.

“A lot of interesting start-ups in the digital media space are sitting on the sidelines .. We’re happy  to see big guys throw around hundreds of thousands on development. We’ll keep our powder try and watch others. If someone hits on the right strategy, we’re not above copying it.” In the meantime, Curbed is content to look for niche mobile opportunities like email newsletters and monetizing the screen that launches when a reader first downloads an app.

Why blogs are beautiful & Gawker’s still got it

Steele says his favorite sites are those that use a traditional blog layout like the Awl or Andrew Sullivan. He believes in a format that lets readers “scroll down and know when they’re full,” versus busy homepages like New York magazine which Steele describes as “seizure-inducing” (though he loves NY mag’s content).

Does he still follow Nick Denton, his former mentor and boss at Gawker, where Steele was the gossip site’s longtime managing editor?

“I still think Nick is one of the most interesting people in media. When it comes to product vision in this media space … I think Nick is pushing forward some of the most interesting ideas,” he said, citing Gawker’s recent attempt to transform the idea of reader comments.

Who else? Steele calls Jim Bankoff and Vox Media the “standard bearer for the media space,” He says sites like Vox Media’s The Verge are “the most beautiful on the web” for their seamless integration of text, audio and video.

Display ads are the Future

No really. While prominent display skeptics like BuzzMedia’s Jonah Peretti claim that banners (those ads that stretch across the top and side of web pages) belong to an earlier era of web publishing, Steele disagrees. “Display advertising is the future. Part of the reason is that display is also the past – people made fun of banners when they debuted on Hotwire in 1995.”

Steele’s point is that display advertising is a staple of the internet economy that publishers and advertisers now know how to buy, use and sell. He says companies continue to see these ads as powerful opportunities to build brand image. This is different than revenue from “click-through” ads about which “no one has illusions.”

To make display advertising work, Steele says, it’s important to keep ad sales in-house. “Giving inventory to ad networks puts you in a world of spiraling CPM’s.”

New York is tech and San Francisco is media (and vice versa)

“The old idea that New York created media and San Francisco created great product is out the window,” says Steele, citing Foursquare, the popular location-based social network, which long shared a roof with Curbed. He believes both cities are pushing each other to improve media platforms and publications. But that doesn’t mean he likes them equally.

“I’m a tried and true New Yorker. If lived in San Francisco, I’d have to kill myself. Other than that it’s a great city.”

(Images by Etienne Volschenk, Kiselev Andrey Valerevich and upthebanner via Shutterstock; L. Steele image via Flickr)

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As national newspapers like the New York Times struggle to reinvent themselves for a digital age, there’s also a widening gap in the local and community-level media market, as the FCC described in its recent report on the state of the media industry. For every chain like the Journal-Register that is trying innovative “digital first” strategies, there are dozens of media outlets trying to downsize their way to profitability or installing paywalls. The Knight Foundation, one of the leading funders of media experimentation in the U.S., is hoping to help solve the local media problem through the Center for Civic Media at MIT. It just announced new funding for the center, and a new director: online media pioneer Ethan Zuckerman.

Zuckerman is a longtime fellow of Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society, where he and former CNN foreign correspondent Rebecca MacKinnon created what became Global Voices Online. That site encourages social activists and others in developing countries around the world to use blogs to combat repression and censorship. In an interview with the Nieman Journalism Lab (which is also affiliated with Harvard), Zuckerman said he sees the Center for Civic Media as having a similar goal: to help citizens of communities throughout the U.S. find new ways to tell their own stories and inform themselves about what is happening around them.

The Center is going to be a place that’s investigating this question of how communities get information, how communities produce information, how people make decisions about becoming civically active. It’s a broader approach to this than just citizen journalism… It’s basically as broad as this question of how do communities make decisions based on information?

The MIT center used to be called the Center for Future Civic Media, but Zuckerman said the name was changed to reflect that it’s hoping to affect the present, not just the future. “The truth is this field is moving so quickly that in many cases I’m actually interested in the present of civic media,” he said. The Knight Foundation — which helped to spark the creation of the center in 2006 after it won the non-profit organization’s annual Knight News Challenge competition — has said it will give the center $3.76 million in funding over the next three years.

In many ways, the local and community-level media market is seeing as much or more upheaval as the national or international news business. Companies like the Journal-Register are trying to reinvent themselves after going bankrupt, while other newspaper chains are continuing to downsize — Gannett just announced it’s laying off 700 staff across the chain — and many newspapers are implementing paywalls to try to shore up their revenue and keep their circulation from continuing to slide.

Meanwhile, entities like AOL’s Patch are trying to move into smaller markets and become the alternative to those traditional media outlets. AOL has spent more than $100 million on installing local journalists in more than 800 towns and communities — and argues it’s filling the “accountability gap” that the FCC noted in its recent report — but the financial viability of the venture is still a big question mark. Some other ventures such as Washington’s TBD have effectively failed. Then there are smaller community-level entities such as the Sacramento Press, the new Chicago News Co-operative, the Tumblr-based Neighborhoodr network and more automated solutions such as Topix and Chicago-based news aggregator Everyblock (which was originally funded by a Knight Foundation grant).

In his interview with the Nieman Lab, Zuckerman said he sees the new Center at MIT (which is a joint venture between the existing MIT Media Lab and the university’s Comparative Media Studies program) as trying to help the various players in this new ecosystem — which includes Twitter and Facebook and other networks — figure out how local and community media works now.

We’re now talking about an ecosystem involving bloggers and twitterers and Facebook and YouTube, as well as all this broadcast media. And literally just trying to figure out how this all works together — what makes one story go viral and another one disappear? Who is shaping the news agenda? These aren’t just academic topics.

The center’s new director also noted that one of the mandates of the Media Lab (which also recently got a new director in Joichi Ito) is that students “need to produce something useable,” not just spend their time talking about academic theory, and that this should help ensure that the new center “doesn’t ever become purely theoretical but is always straddling the boundary between theory and practice.” Whether any of those projects can help provide a solution for struggling local and community media remains to be seen.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr user David Reece

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Most hyper-local news startups have tended to take one of two main approaches: one focused on mechanized aggregation using algorithms, and the other based primarily on content produced by human beings. EveryBlock, which was founded in 2007 by programmer and former Washington Post staffer Adrian Holovaty, started out in the first category, pulling together feeds of news and government data such as crime reports based on specific locations. But with Monday’s relaunch, Holovaty says he is trying hard to move the service in the opposite direction and focus more on the people in a community rather than the data.

To do that, the site — which was acquired by MSNBC in 2009 — has undergone a redesign from top to bottom, with new features that make it more obvious that comments from members are encouraged and to reward those who participate. (Users can click a button to “thank” a submitter, for example.) Holovaty said in an interview that users were able to post comments on the old version of the site, but that function was “bolted on and not really that easy to use” so didn’t get a lot of participation. The new commenting function is front and center, he says, and EveryBlock has also built a reputation system that will rank users based on their interaction with the site.

Holovaty — who also developed the popular Django web framework — admitted he has changed the way he thinks about the purpose of EveryBlock. In the beginning, he says, he thought that simply accumulating a lot of detailed information about neighborhoods in cities like Chicago (where the company is based) would be enough to build something useful for people. But he no longer believes this. In a live-chat at the Poynter Institute site on Tuesday, he said:

It may be kind of obtuse, but I have stopped believing that “You’re more informed” is an end. It’s a means to a different end, if that makes any sense. There’s probably a bigger lesson in here somewhere for journalism.

The end goal now, Holovaty says, is to help members of a community make their neighborhood a better place by giving them information about things that are happening — but also a forum for discussing that news, whether it’s a report of a break-in or a zoning change somewhere. “We’re shifting from being a news feed to being a platform for discussion around neighborhood news,” he said. The realization that pure information wasn’t enough came from listening to feedback from users, he said, who wanted a way to express themselves as well as just the data about what was happening.

I think EveryBlock’s change of heart was a necessary one. I’ve argued in the past that whatever value local news sites have comes not from the data, but from the people at the heart of that community — which is why even poorly designed services that are built by the people in a town or neighborhood are almost always better than services that are set up by companies with a one-size-fits-all approach. History is littered with examples of well-meaning services such as Backfence and Bayosphere that never really connected with the communities they were supposed to serve.

Even Topix, which was originally created as an automated aggregator of content for local sites, eventually discovered — as CEO Chris Tolles mentioned in an interview with me recently — that it had actually become a sounding board for residents of small towns and regions across the U.S. to talk about their elected officials or other issues. Becoming that kind of community hub is something AOL  is going to have to figure out how to do with Patch as well, which it has spent an estimated $100 million on rolling out to almost 1,000 locations. Buying Outside.in, which also took the automated approach to local news, might help generate content but it isn’t going to generate community.

The big question is whether EveryBlock can succeed in this new direction. Despite the redesign, the site’s local hubs still feel very mechanical or automated, and one or two comments from residents of those areas isn’t going to suddenly make it feel like a community service. It’s going to take a lot of work to turn EveryBlock into a people-centered place instead of a computer-generated simulation of a community.

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According to multiple news reports this morning, AOL has agreed to acquire hyper-local news aggregator Outside.in for a sum reported to be less than $10 million, substantially below the $14.4 million the company has raised from venture funds and other sources. After four years of trying, the service has more or less failed to become much more than a local aggregator, pulling in automated feeds of news, blogs and keyword searches based on location. And that’s because it was all data and no community — in other words, all brains and no heart.

There is a business in doing this, but not a very big one, and that’s because simply aggregating data isn’t going to produce enough traffic or engagement to get advertisers interested. As Marshall Kirkpatrick notes, the field is littered with hyper-local experiments that have not really succeeded. Why? I think it’s because many of these, including Outside.in, focus too much on the how of hyper-local — the automated feeds and the aggregation of news sources, which sites like Everyblock (which was bought by MSNBC in 2009) and Topix do with algorithms — rather than the why. And the why is simple: to serve a community. Unless a site can do that, it will fail.

So how do you do that? The most successful community news operations — like a startup called Sacramento Press, which continues to grow rapidly despite the presence of a traditional newspaper competitor in the McClatchy paper The Sacramento Bee, or a Danish newspaper project called JydskeVestkysten, which has thousands of community-based correspondents who submit content for a series of hyper-local sites — come from the communities that they serve. They aren’t data aggregators that are imposed on those towns and regions by some external source, but come from within them.

The easiest way to see whether a hyper-local site is working or not is to look at the comments. Are there heated discussions going on in the comments on stories? If not, then the site is likely to be a ghost town. History is filled with local news experiments like Backfence — which was founded by former Washington Post staffer Mark Potts and shut down in 2007 — and Dan Gillmor’s Bayosphere, which never really managed to connect with the communities they were supposed to be serving, despite all the best intentions (among the newer startups trying to take a community-first approach is OpenFile, a kind of pro-am local journalism startup based in Toronto).

In the comments at Read/Write Web, the founder of Everyblock, programmer and entrepreneur Adrian Holovaty, said that his service is trying to add more community to its sites by focusing on comments and discussion around the issues — and that’s a good thing, because without it, there is nothing but a collection of automated data, and no one is going to form a strong relationship with that. Some have argued in the wake of local site TBD’s closure in Washington that hyper-local simply doesn’t scale as a business, something journalism professor Jay Rosen also wondered about in a recent comment on Twitter. But it certainly doesn’t scale if the community never buys into the idea.

Topix, which says it is one of the largest local news services on the web, started out doing the news aggregation thing just like Outside.in and Everyblock, co-founder Chris Tolles said recently in an interview with me, and then almost accidentally started to become a community hub for lots of small towns and regions that didn’t have anywhere else to talk about the issues. Topix has focused on expanding those kinds of discussions, by targeting local hubs with features such as election-based polls during the recent mid-term elections, in order to spark more debate and engagement.

This is the central challenge for AOL and its Patch.com effort, which has already spent over $50 million launching hyper-local news operations in almost a thousand cities across the United States. The sites are designed to be one-man or one-woman units, with a local journalist (in many cases, one that came from a traditional media outlet) as the core of the operation, writing local news but also pulling in other local content from blogs, government sources and elsewhere. And most of the sites appear to highlight the comments from readers prominently, which is a smart move.

But can this massive, manufacturing-style effort from a web behemoth manage to connect with enough towns on a grassroots level and really become a core part of those communities? Because without that, AOL is pouring money into a bottomless pit.

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As a journalism startup run by a widely-admired former Washington Post online veteran, TBD.com had a lot of high hopes riding on it. Among other things, it looked like the site could help to pave the way for other smart, locally-focused media experiments, and provide a kind of antidote to the institutionalized approach that AOL’s Patch is taking to local journalism. But co-founder Jim Brady suddenly left TBD not long after it launched, and the site has since been absorbed by its corporate parent, which runs a series of traditional TV stations. Some have argued that local online efforts like TBD simply can’t succeed, but others maintain the site’s failure is a result of corporate infighting, and says nothing about the strength of the original concept.

Although the original announcement from Allbritton Communications a few weeks ago suggested the site was simply being tweaked a little, along with some management and administrative changes, this week, it became obvious that TBD has effectively been demolished. More than a dozen employees were let go, most of whom had been hired specifically for TBD, although some were told they could apply for a handful of new jobs at the company. The actual site itself — designed to be an ambitious, Washington-focused, news site with hyper-local aspects involving a local blog network and other crowdsourced content — is apparently going to become a niche entertainment and lifestyle destination, while the TV arm of Allbritton has taken over the news operation.

Alan Mutter, a media-industry veteran who writes a blog under the name Newsosaur, said the failure of TBD was yet another example of how “hyper-local” journalism doesn’t really work as a business and how such projects are “more hype than hope.” Mutter noted that several other hyper-local news experiments have also failed, including one called Backfence that was shut down in 2007, and a more recent one called Loudoun Extra, which was financed in part by the Washington Post and was closed in 2009. Mutter said such sites failed for a number of reasons including:

• Small audiences. Most such efforts expect a large number of people will want to read local news, but “practically, there is not that much compelling news about the average community in the average month.”
• Big expenses. Producing quality content requires a lot of staff and significant production costs, and selling advertising to local businesses also requires a lot of people and time.
• Small revenues. Because such sites have small audiences, they can only sell sponsorships for tiny amounts of money, and “the low yields barely cover the cost of the sales effort.”

Rick Edmonds at the Poynter Institute also argued Allbritton made a number of serious mistakes with the launch of TBD, including choosing an unknown brand for its new venture and relying on the “pedigree” of its founders and early hires instead of coming up with a compelling idea. Poynter has more coverage of the story, and others have also weighed in on the demise of the site, including former Guardian editor Emily Bell, who now runs the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University, and founder Jim Brady, who talked about the project in an interview with the Columbia Journalism Review.

John Paton disagrees with the pessimism of Mutter and Edmonds, however — and he is putting a lot of money on the line in defence of his views, since he is the CEO of Journal-Register Co., a chain of small daily and weekly newspapers in New Jersey, Connecticut and several other states that he took over management of after it went bankrupt last year. Paton has taken an aggressively open and web-based approach to the restructuring of the company, including a number of innovations such as a “community-centered newsroom.” Paton took on some of the critics of TBD in a blog post entitled “Hyperlocal Can’t Be Monetized and Other Lies You Heard This Week About TBD,” saying:

What Allbritton did was ‘back’ a high-profile strategy that got them lots of positive press. It hit some bumps in the road and then they simply stopped because they never understood what they were ‘backing’ and it was costing money. Perhaps more than they first thought. Well, welcome to the business jungle.

Paton made it clear he is moving forward with his company’s hyper-local news approach online, and he’s not alone: AOL’s Patch has spent close to $100 million setting up local news operations in almost 1,000 towns and regions across the U.S., and the company said it plans to continue to roll out that strategy. As Patch continues its moves into the Washington region, Allbritton Communications may wish that it had invested more time and money in building TBD instead of shutting it down so quickly.

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Hyper-local was a big buzzword in the media sphere in 2010, thanks in part to the multimillion-dollar launch and rollout of AOL’s Patch project, and one of the more closely-watched local experiments was based in Washington, D.C. and launched with much fanfare in August, under the somewhat unusual name TBD. Run by former Washington Post digital executive Jim Brady, the site was designed to be a hybrid of a traditional news operation and an online-first, community-driven news site. Brady left within a few months of the launch, however, and today the parent company behind the project — a media holding company called Albritton Communications — said it is restructuring the site, in what appears to be a scaling back of its original ambitions.

Albritton appeared to be placing a lot of emphasis on TBD when it first launched: not only was there a news website with an ambitious community-oriented strategy, but the company (whose holdings consist mainly of television stations) even renamed one of its cable news channels TBD-TV as part of the project. That has now been undone as part of Wednesday’s announcement, however, and the channel has regained its original name, Newschannel 8. In addition, according to sources quoted by the Washington Post, the television station has effectively taken over administration of the TBD.com website, news that caused New York University journalism professor Jay Rosen to say on Twitter that “the TV guys won” and that there would soon be a “mass exodus” of web staff.

The news of the restructuring sheds some more light on the departure of former president Brady, who quit the company he helped launch in November after what he said was a disagreement about strategy with publisher Robert Albritton. In an internal memo published at Fishbowl DC, Albritton put the disagreement down to “stylistic differences,” but comments from Brady since — including in interviews with a number of different news sites — have made it clear that part of the friction came from clashes between the traditional TV side of the operation and the web side. In a comment today that seemed to sum up both his departure and the new thrust of the site, Brady said:

At good companies, the people who resist necessary change are pushed aside. At bad companies, they are put in charge. RIP, the old TBD.

Brady could well be extra sensitive to this kind of battle because many believe that the Washington Post fought a similar one, and in that case the “print guys won,” as Jay Rosen put it last year. The newspaper, which used to have a completely separate web operation — with separate management, located in a separate building from the print side — merged its two units last year, and according to a number of observers the management of the paper operation had effectively taken control of the web unit.

Although the TBD news caused a number of media observers to sound the death knell for the site, editor-in-chief Erik Wemple — who took over after Brady’s departure — said that the funeral bells are a little premature. He told the Nieman Journalism Lab that the site continues to be a priority for Albritton, and that no one is being laid off; if anything, he said, the head-count might increase as the company builds up a separate website for its television unit alongside the TBD site. Wemple also said that the community focus of the original project would continue as well. And Albritton is no stranger to web-based news startups: the company is also a financial backer of the successful Politico website.

Brady, however, said that the “everything will be OK” message from management didn’t reflect how people still working at the site feel. “They can’t say it, but I can,” he wrote. “It’s not good.” Albritton’s challenge now is to prove that what was once a celebrated hyper-local web startup doesn’t become just another TV station website.

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Post and thumbnail courtesy of Flickr user George Kelly

Although I don’t live in one of the supported neighborhoods, I gave Yahoo Local a spin on my Nexus One and walked away relatively impressed. Of course, I live in an area filled with cows and farms where the biggest news is typically along the lines of a smashed mailbox, so I’m a pushover when it comes to exciting happenings. But it is downright refreshing to see news from various local sources, including user created content, mixed in with nearby entertainment options and money saving deals from commercial businesses in the area. Yahoo is smartly courting local content creators to help build neighborhood information for residents:

When it comes to the best local news and information, we’re delivering relevant hyper-local neighborhood and city content created by the community, local publishers, and Yahoo! editors.  We’re featuring content from the best local blogs and newspapers.  And through a completely open ecosystem, we’re making it possible for any local publisher to be part of the new Yahoo! Local. By leveraging the power of the Yahoo! Contributor Network, the entire community can participate and publish stories on topics that matter to them. Individuals and organizations can also add events that are relevant to the local community.

While the concept of delivering hyper-local content at the neighborhood level surely brings value to area residents, this is more about Yahoo’s play for hyper-local advertising revenues. Yahoo has no check-in service like Facebook, Foursquare or Gowalla, although it does offer geo-location developer tools. So it has limited services to effectively attract potential advertisers looking to target highly focused consumers in specific places. And although in March, Yahoo said it was laser-focused on bringing local brand advertising to its content, the company hasn’t discerned how to crack the local ad market just yet.

Indeed, Yahoo’s press release explicitly calls attention to this, suggesting that the company is still trying to figure out the best way to use its brand and content, saying “[W]e are fundamentally changing how users will interact with local content, including advertising. As we build out the experience, we’re exploring and experimenting with various advertising solutions that will enable our advertising partners to reach their target users.”

It sounds, then, like Yahoo Local is a beta both for users in 30 neighborhoods as well as Yahoo itself, which is trying to stay relevant as upstart location-based services threaten advertising revenues from web pioneers.

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When OpenFile founder and CEO Wilf Dinnick was still working as a foreign correspondent for CNN in the Middle East, he was summoned to the network’s London office where the senior executives showed off iReport, CNN’s citizen journalism project. “They said if the twin towers fell today, people wouldn’t be watching it on CNN, they would go to YouTube,” he recalls. The light bulb went on, and Dinnick says he started to think and talk to other friends and journalists about the power of user-generated content and what Jeff Jarvis calls “networked journalism.” The result of that brainstorm was the creation of OpenFile, which launched last month in Toronto and plans to expand to several other cities over the coming months.

OpenFile is not doing “citizen journalism,” says Dinnick. Instead, it uses trained journalists — many of whom have come from one of the mainstream media outlets in Canada, which have been shedding staff — as the core of its hyper-local news operation. So in Toronto, for example, former newspaper editor Kathy Vey acts as something like a managing editor, dealing with contributors and making sure the stories they’re working on are appropriately handled and reported. The company’s name came from the idea that any user of the site can suggest a story or post a news tip, which then “opens a file” on that topic that both readers and the journalist assigned to the story can contribute to.

The idea, Dinnick says, is to make reporting on local issues — whether it’s an abandoned building that residents feel is an eyesore, or a zoning change for a specific site — an “ongoing, living story” that the community can become a part of, rather than a one-off that a reporter sitting in a newsroom miles away from the community files, then forgets about. Although the journalists working for OpenFile aren’t really bloggers, the startup’s approach seems very blog-like to me, with readers contributing comments and suggestions, even uploading images and videos, which the reporter can then work into the ongoing story about that topic or issue. Being digital allows OpenFile to do something community newspapers used to do, the founder and CEO says, but far more cheaply, and at bigger scale.

When it comes to funding, Dinnick says OpenFile approached a number of the major media entities in Canada, as well as some traditional venture capital sources, and wound up getting a substantial amount of seed funding from a large financial player in Toronto that doesn’t wish to be identified — enough to fund the company’s capital requirements for at least three to four years. OpenFile has also signed up a number of national advertisers for the site and is building a local sales force. It has also been having discussions with some large media companies about partnerships and syndication opportunities.

Dinnick says that since the site opened in beta-mode in May, he and his team have learned that when the community-sourced journalism model works, “it works really well.” The biggest surprise, he says, is “how difficult it has been to get across what we are trying to do. People are used to either a top-down model for journalism or the bottom-up approach that they get with social media like Twitter, and we’re kind of in the middle.” The startup has signed up 250 about 200 reporters who freelance for the site primarily in Toronto, and is considering a freemium model, where membership would give readers access to different features.

A number of startups and digital ventures have been trying to make hyper-local journalism work at some kind of scale in the U.S., including aggregators like Outside.in and Topix. Of course, the 800-pound gorilla is Patch.com, the local journalism venture that AOL was planning to spend upwards of $50 million on this year. OpenFile is similar to Patch in that both it and Patch are looking to cover communities by hiring a journalist who can effectively become an editorial co-ordinator for the local effort by finding freelancers, bloggers, etc. Whether that model can really scale is something both Patch and OpenFile will find out soon enough.

Embedded below is a short video interview I did with Dinnick recently in Toronto:

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