(2007-07-31) Now Public

LizGannes interviews Len Brody of Now Public, a Citizen Journalism site (which just got $10M of VC money).

• he doesn't believe in HyperLocal, because he thinks geography matters less to people now

• he has a deal with the AP.

• they might pay contributors eventually.

Jeff Jarvis thinks their de-emphasis of HyperLocal is just a cop-out. Local is damned hard because no one yet - apart from newspaper companies - has managed to get a critical mass of local content and no one - including me - knows yet how to create an alternative that can gather and share that much and more on new economics. But I have no doubt - no doubt - that there will always be a market for local news... Not every story is local. And lots of local angles are insipid. But to say that young people don't care about local is making the mistake the AP made with asap.

• Peter Ralph comments: Newspapers are produced every 24 hours irrespective of how many newsworthy events occur. The problem with hyperlocal news is that there is very little of it. Who is going to check in to a hyperlocal news site every day?

• Stowe Boyd thinks one reason the local newspapers are falling by the wayside, in a time of increased mobility and generations of growing mobility behind us is that people have less connections to the specific turf that they sleep in or work in. The Social Capital in the neighborhood continues to dwindle.

I had real troubles searching for places, but finally figured out that it liked the '+' separator for multi-word places. http://www.nowpublic.com/tag/East+Village Yikes that page has 3 posts from the last year! http://www.nowpublic.com/tag/Manhattan has 3 posts from the past week. http://www.nowpublic.com/tag/New+York has roughly 10 from the past week. That's a Critical Mass problem.

Their Politics tab is mostly national/international. All stories are tagged, but the tags are not visible except at the individual-story level (each story has its own page, which is basically a place to navigate to other things: it's rather annoying to have to click again past there to get to the real story.