The Local

This morning, we stumbled upon what appears to be the first New York-centric news aggregation Web site that leaves homepage curation up to readers.

Taking a cue from social news sites like Digg and Reddit, NYC.is lets users share city-specific links and vote them up or down to determine how much promotion they get. As of this posting, some popular front-page topics included a New York Post article about absent City Council members, a Grist.org item about hawks on the Upper West Side, and a New York Times story—uploaded, we might add, by Jennifer 8. Lee! —about a Mexican restaurant in Corona, Queens. 

“I like the dynamism and the eclecticism. The fact that you get an interesting mix of local content,” said Ms. Lee, speaking strictly as a user of the site. “You get the funky, quirky item about a flood of people dressed like vampires in Brooklyn along with very serious items about things like housing and transportation policy. It would be fascinating to see if the model can be replicated.”

NYC.is was created by Susannah Vila, a 24-year-old political science grad student at Columbia who did stints at The Nation and CBS News after graduating from N.Y.U. in 2007. She launched the site in a private Beta testing phase back in March, and brought it public at the beginning of the summer with some PR help from her friend Simon Owens, a 25-year-old D.C.-based social-media consultant and blogger.

“There are thousands of bloggers and independent reporters writing in and about NYC, but no hub to connect them all,” said Ms. Vila of the impetus behind NYC.is, in an e-mail. “I think my site is the only one connecting all the different small scale bloggers, reporters, or anyone at all who wants to write about his or her community, giving him/her a place to promote their work and network with each other.”

Of course NYC.is has entered what seems like an increasingly saturated hyperlocal news market.

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:

Getty Images

Tim Armstrong.

Today, June 11, AOL annouced that it is acquiring Patch, the New York–based start-up, as well as Going.com, a nightlife event guide "for people who love to go out." Patch's sites, which currently cover six towns in New Jersey (with four more in development, according to Patch's chief executive Jon Brod) are hyperlocal neighborhood information portals that combine journalism from professional reporters with information from local government. The sites also include various platforms for users to submit pictures, stories and videos. No surprise on the Patch news, since the company was co-founded by Tim Armstrong, Google’s former vice president of advertising sales and now AOL's new chair and chief executive. His statment from the release:

“Local remains one of the most disaggregated experiences on the Web today -- there’s a lot of information out there but simply no way for consumers to find it quickly and easily,” said Tim Armstrong, AOL’s Chairman and CEO. “It’s a space that’s prime for innovation and an area where AOL has a significant audience and a valuable mapping service in MapQuest. Going forward, local will be a core area of focus and investment for AOL. The acquisitions of Patch and Going will help us build out our local network further with excellent local services that enable people to stay better informed about what’s going on in their neighborhood.”

But local isn't just "a core area of focus and investment" for online companies. It's a storied Times issue—and now their zoom level is getting even smaller. 

NYTimes.com's The Local news Web sites (which cover, in part, Patch's territory in New Jersey) just debuted a new feature that will take the community cue and allow readers to cover meetings, write articles and contribute photos and videos to the Clinton Hill and Fort Greene blog. They might even get some decent writing in there—these neighborhoods are the heart of the Brooklyn Literary 100, after all!

>>READ THE FULL STORY ON OBSERVER.COM

Courtesy of Tom Lowenhaupt.

On a Wednesday evening in early May, a group of residents from Manhattan, Queens and Brooklyn gathered at a meeting hall in the East Village to brainstorm how New York’s more than 300 neighborhoods could exist on the Internet.

They envisioned a network of Web sites, tentatively called “dotNYC Neighborhoods,” that would combine elements of citizen journalism with resources like discussion groups, maps, demographics, calendars, links to civic applications, and comprehensive listings for everything from restaurants to 24-hour-pharmacies. Each neighborhood would get its own URL ending in “.nyc”—astoria.nyc, bushwick.nyc, eastvillage.nyc, and so on—making it as direct and easy as possible to search for and pinpoint information about a given area.

The idea, said Tom Lowenhaupt, a 62-year-old Jackson Heights resident and former community board member who runs a not-for-profit organization called Connecting.nyc, which had convened the meeting, is to put the entire city on the Internet in a way that mirrors its geographic composition.

“It’s never been done before, but New York is the perfect model,” said Mr. Lowenhaupt after the meeting, sipping a cup of hot tea outside a Second Avenue Dunkin’ Donuts.

“It would allow people to coordinate things, to organize,” he continued. “Our vision is to make this an infrastructure upon which social, civic, cultural and economic life will flourish.”

The timing does seem apt considering more and more media companies are starting to emphasize the “hyperlocal.” In fact, some recent startups, like Patch and The New York Times' The Local, which both cover a handful of communities in suburban New Jersey and Brooklyn, offer a similar type of service to what Connecting.nyc has is mind. Outside.in is another.

But perhaps the most noteworthy thing about Connecting.nyc’s proposal is the fact that as far as the Internet’s naming system is concerned, “.nyc” does not exist.

At least not yet.