links for 2010-02-17

"Guardian Local is a collaborative community journalism initiative to provide local online news and information in three cities across the UK". Leeds has gone live as the first of the cities today.

"Our new experiment in local journalism and community coverage has launched. Emily Bell explains what the people of Leeds, Edinburgh and Cardiff can expect"

"To think about these issues [design on the iPad], I got in touch with John-Henry Barac. He spent a decade at The Guardian on the print side, as an art director and designer, then moved to the digital world. As a consultant, he designed The Guardian’s first iPhone app, which stands out as one of the more interesting within the iPhone news app world".

"Alastair Bruce, content manager for MSN UK, has studied over 30 organisations to produce this detailed presentation on pay wall and subscription models."

Very nice bit of "show your working", although I presume there will be comment apocalypse 'it wasn't broke why fix it etc etc' when they actually start rolling this out to high profile areas of the site.

"Readers would be able to drag left and right to navigate articles; once choosing an article, they would navigate up and down to scroll through the story". Look, I don't mean to be a boring old cynic, but trust me, if you believe that the main business issue facing the print media industry is that people have been crying out to swish electronic pages left'and'right and have nicer scrolling, and once we fix that, the money will fall into place, well...

As well as a look at Metro's seemingly print orientated app, there is "Last but not least in today's iPhone feast is Localpeople, the iPhone app launched by the hyperlocal project of the same name". One selling point appears to be listings by people rather than advertisers.

"In a media landscape where everyone can share stories at any time, consumers devour their news on the move or explore their world with gaming applications. Join a panel, with The Guardian’s Sarah Hartley, Iain Hepburn from the Scottish Daily Record and information architect Martin Belam to discuss the immense and varied challenges and opportunities facing journalists."

"Articles on The Guardian site often have hundreds of comments; does that make it a blog? Techcrunch is published on a blogging platform, but has a team of professional writers and ad revenues in the millions; does that mean it’s no longer a blog?"