The Huffington Post

via outside.in

In recent weeks, we've been following some "hyperlocal" New York City media and journalism developments.

On Sunday, The Huffington Post launched a New York edition, which is partnering with community newspapers like the Bronx News Network and The Riverdale Press and offering up its citizen journalism unit to the online politics and policy publication The Gotham Gazette. (Incidentally, as we reported last week, The Gazette just won a $250,000 grant to build a City Council watchdog wiki that will combine citizen journalism with reporting and fact-checking by the Gazette's editorial staff.)

As my colleague Gillian Reagan recently noted, The New York Times' new Web site The Local, which covers Fort Greene and Clinton Hill, has launched a virtual assignment desk that encourages readers to "Be The Journalist"—the site lists meetings that need covering, and readers volunteer to attend, take notes and file a report to be edited by the blog's staff.

And back in May, we profiled a not-for-profit organization that's campaigning to acquire the ".nyc" top level domain when it becomes available in 2010 in order to set up a city-wide network of neighborhood Web sites.

So we read with interest Fred Wilson's post about local media today on A VC. He writes:

via The Huffington Post

A screen capture of 24-Hour KickMap.

Earlier this week, The Huffington Post launched its new local New York edition, and they have a fun feature ranking the top-10 New York City-based iPhone applications. There's a slideshow of the apps and a polling feature where users can rate each one on a 10-point scale of "Lame" to "Want It."

So far, the user favorite is the iPhone version of HopStop (free), the popular transit-route planning Web site, which has a voting average of 9 out of 10. Not surprisingly, two other subway navigation tools are close behind—City Transit NYC Subway Guide and 24-Hour KickMap, both $1.99, and both with a voting average of 7.5 out of 10 as of the time we posted this. The lowest-rated app so far is Tattoo of the Day (free), which provides daily snap shots from the famous East Village tattoo shop New York Adorned. When we checked, its rating was a measly 2.7 out of 10, which we'd have to agree with, not because we dislike tattoos, but because so many people get bad ones!

Other apps you can vote on include Foursquare, the Dodgeball-esque social tracker that gives users points for going out to new bars and restaurants and meeting new people; MultiCam New York, which shows traffic cameras for the city's busiest locations; and SpotCrime NYC, which tracks recent crime activity from all around the five boroughs.