The Newspaper solution is emerging from the mist

Sooner or later, education will be defined as a hyperlocal community. Replacing textbooks with a new product, which I've been calling textbooklets, should help fix education. Fixing newspapers or the Print industry is some people's problem.

Fixing education is everyone's problem.

Most likely that "hyperlocal" will continue it's rise to number 1 in the blahblah-o-sphere. What is new is that real players are now starting the real work of defining that on the ground.

The good news for Print, is that the closer it moves to the ground, the more the unique value of news-on-paper is defined. The good news for newspapers is that it's now about execution, not about "what to do?" The good news for education is that once those are two industries get out of their "deer in the headlights" moment, we can all get on to fixing education.

Thanks to Mathew Ingram and Martin Langeveld, over at the NiemanJournalismLab, for their most recent posts.

From Martin's post,

Hearst’s 100 days of change: On the right track, or misguided?
Steven R. Swartz, appointed president of Hearst’s newspaper division in December, sent around a memo last week reporting to his troops on the “100 days of change” he launched not long after taking the job, the midpoint of which had come around.

Predictably, the memo got leaked and was published by the Wall Street Journal (scroll down). And predictably as well, Jeff Jarvis deconstructs it, line by line, as “too little, too late”:

Give a guy a break, already. It’s not hard for us journobloggers to pounce all over the industry’s hapless execs. I’ve done it myself, back in November when the clueless gathered at API to deal with “an industry in crisis” and decided that meeting again in six months would be a really good idea. (To their credit, they met again after just two months.) . . . read the rest over there..

From Matthew's post,

Google Exec and NYT go Hyperlocal
There’s an interesting battle shaping up in the “hyper-local” online journalism market, at least in the New York and New Jersey area. The New York Times confirmed on Monday that it is launching a new project called The Local, in co-operation with journalism students at the City University of New York.
. . . That isn’t the only battle over this particular hyper-local effort: As Jarvis noted in his post, another local journalism network called Patch is targeting the exact same locations in New Jersey — and it happens to be backed by Google executive Tim Armstrong.
. . . I wrote about another experiment in hyper-local journalism — or what project founder Leonard Witt calls “representative journalism” — in a recent Nieman Lab post. Much like the NYT plan, Witt’s project involves a trained journalist or intern writing news about a region as the core of a site that is also built up of contributions from community members of all kinds.