Today’s links 12/09/2011

• Tom Stites: Might the new web journalism model be neither for-profit nor nonprofit? » Nieman Journalism Lab

  Judging by experience in other countries, the answer is yes. Long-established reader-owned co-ops publish newspapers in Italy, Germany, England and Mexico. A worker-owned cooperative is creating an ambitious city-by-city set of news sites across Canada that combine to publish a national weekly newspaper. Also in Canada, listener-owned co-ops operate radio stations.

  tags: nonprofit model journalism co-op co-operative

  • The Banyan Project, which I lead, is building a reader-owned co-op model that’s designed to scale massively, the way depositor-owned credit unions and shopper-owned food co-ops have scaled community by community, coast to coast. Banyan has chosen Haverhill, Massachusetts — a middle-income city of 60,879 whose daily newspaper has devolved into an under-resourced weekly and whose radio station has shut down — as its pilot community.

• AOL’s Patch Gets a Little Less Hyper-Local | Digital – Advertising Age

  tags: patch aol advertising hyperlocal

  • in a recent interview, Jon Brod, president of AOL Ventures, Local & Mapping, said that the focus is still on what the company calls “local-local” advertisers as well as “regional-local” advertisers, with whom Patch has yet to have much success. Mr. Brod said that Patch will continue to roll out a new assisted self-service ad platform to help better monetize the local advertising markets. The platform consists of three segments of tools for local advertisers: one to generate leads, one to build brand awareness, and one to offer deals, he said.

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.