links for 2011-02-06

In summary, you want to see articles and photos, but you want to be able to comment about them. You’d like to know what our local councils and politicians are up to. Information from the police about crime and relevant initiatives is important and you wouldn’t mind knowing about travel and transport in the area. Listings for local events and information about food and drink are also a priority. You’re keen to know about good tradesmen that people are happy to recommend and you won’t mind if there’s advertising from local businesses.

The Facebook Deals platform – part of the social network’s Places product – allows users to register at physical locations using their mobile device in order to receive discounts and rewards, much like rival location-based service Foursquare.

Some tidbits:

* AOL tells its editors to decide what topics to cover based on four considerations: traffic potential, revenue potential, edit quality and turn-around time.

* AOL asks its editors to decide whether to produce content based on "the profitability consideration."

* The documents reveal that AOL is, when the story calls for it, willing to boost traffic by 5 to 10% with search ads and other "paid media."

* AOL site leaders are expected to have eight ideas for packages that could generate at least $1 million in revenue on hand at all times.

* In-house AOL staffers are expected to write five to 10 stories per day.

* AOL knows its sites are too dependent on traffic from AOL.com, and it wants its editors to fix the problem by posting more frequently, with more emphasis on getting pageviews.

Although hyperlocals have been 'the next big thing' in journalism for a number of years, practitioners are still searching for a business model that works. So far, they've had limited success selling ads. It's a challenge to try to reach small local businesses that may know nothing about online advertising. There's also the fact that by their very nature, hyperlocals attract a relatively small audience. But the hyperlocal market also happens to be a potentially lucrative source of untapped advertising revenue.

When ImpactGames launched Play the News, a prediction game we discuss at length in the Platforms chapter of Newsgames: Journalism at Play, they set out to make the act of playing informative. Making a prediction was not about choosing what kind of dress Kate Middleton would wear; it was about considering the outcomes of complex situations based on stakeholders. The game rewarded extended research and awarded points based on analytical thinking. After all, it's much harder to guess the outcome of an Israeli-Palestinian conflict than if Apple will release a new iPad in Q1 2011.