links for 2011-01-05

Hyper local – This is a mass term for what is, in reality, a lively emerging collection of niches – different approaches, shapes and sizes of organizations covering local news as well as different content. I hear it used to apply to just about any online news start up and I suspect a lot of people using the term don’t know exactly what they mean by it.

Sure, you can find (at least temporary) comfort in the familiar. Keep working on traditional, quote-three-sources-including-one-elected-official, inverted pyramid, newspaper-style stories. Maybe add a part-time blog on the side, to feel "hip" and score some points with your boss. If you get laid off (or fear you might be), send clips and resumes to other newsrooms. If that doesn't elicit a job offer, look for a j-school faculty gig. Keep attending the same industry conferences, networking with other newsroom journalists, to commiserate about how tomorrow just doesn't look or feel like the good old days.

When a PDF contains just images of text, as they do in scanned documents, then the problem isn't just how to convert them into neat tabular data, but how to extract any text, period.

In this tutorial, we'll explain how to write a program to extract the data into tabular format.

I've been noticing a number of different ways in which people use Quora, and thought a collection of tips on how to get the best out of it would be useful.

Quora could, as some have predicted, turn out to be a big hit among tech-opiners and then be over before the average consumer has even caught a whiff of it.

Each *Twitter account curates the best Twitter feeds within the geography, and is automatically set to retweet local feeds with the type of local information that communities want to see: News, Things to Do, and Deals. Curation is best done manually on-the-ground by a local

Perhaps the print newspaper business in the United States is becoming more like that in United Kingdom, which has 1,200 newspapers but the top eight papers with the highest circulation are all national papers — except we’ll have three instead of eight. But we now have something the U.K. doesn’t have.