Should the government be spending tax dollars printing tiny type in newspapers? The arguments in favor

By Mac Slocum

Public notices, those tiny-type blurbs announcing zoning issues, licensing applications and public meetings, seem anachronistic in our database-driven world. Does anyone use them? Can anyone use them, with that crammed-in text? They’re a long-term accepted oddity that persists today. When Geoff Cowan and David Westphal came out with their report last week on government’s historic subsidies of the press, the printing of public notices as newspaper advertising was one of the awkward stars. As Cowan and Westphal put it:

Historically, these fine-print notices have been a lucrative business for newspaper publishers, and have touched off heated bidding wars for government contracts…But the era of big money in public notices will almost certainly fade away. Proposals have been introduced in 40 states to allow local and state agencies to shift publication to the Web, in some cases to the government’s own Web sites.

And when those proposals are made, newspaper companies are quick to defend their lucrative turf — vociferously. Legislatures in Missouri, Pennsylvania and Ohio, among others, have considered moving public notices to government-run websites as a cost-cutting maneuver. These efforts are often for naught after strong newspaper opposition. (Virginia’s the latest, last week.)

Since the case against public notices seems so obvious — why should a local government buy ad space in a newspaper when it can publish the same material itself, in a more searchable and useful form? — I wanted to hear the arguments on the other side. Tonda Rush, a registered lobbyist for the newspaper industry and head of the Public Notice Resource Center, outlined for me the common arguments surrounding public notices. They fall into three domains. Keep reading »

VT Digger: How a layoff spawned a nonprofit site in less than a year

By Mac Slocum

Anne Galloway didn’t know anything about nonprofits or websites when she was laid off from Vermont’s Times Argus last January. She once believed the web was more distracting than resourceful. But a layoff has a funny way of upending your perspective, and now Galloway sits at the helm of her own nonprofit news site.

Galloway launched VT Digger in September 2009 with designs on filling a coverage gap in her home state of Vermont. Take a look through the offerings and you’ll see much of the content reads like the nitty-gritty stuff that used to grab column inches. That’s the point. During months of pre-launch interviews and research, Galloway concluded that the demand for enterprise reporting isn’t being met by the reduced staffs of Vermont’s newspapers.

VT Digger isn’t a hobby or a side project. Galloway is all in. She works full-time on the site, often starting at 4 a.m. and finishing up well after dinner. When I talked to her, she had just settled in at the Vermont statehouse. She’s commuting 45 minutes each way while the legislature is in session.

On the content side, Galloway tries to post 5-7 pieces a week. That’s a tough task for what’s basically a one-person operation. It’s made harder by the time-intensive nature of her content, which often requires interviews and background research. But in a savvy bit of efficiency, she’s boosting coverage by dialing back her editorial filter. That’s not to say she’s posting shaky articles. She’s just letting readers parse information for themselves. Keep reading »

CNET and Gizmodo are sharing content, and they don’t seem worried about a “duplicate penalty”

By Mac Slocum

CNET and Gizmodo have been sharing content for the last couple months. I confirmed that a partnership exists, but requests for additional information from either party were not fruitful.

Frankly, the most intriguing aspect of this partnership is already in plain view: The sites are posting the same articles. Take a look at this Gizmodo story then click over to the CNET version. Headlines change and there are subtle formatting differences, but the body copy is essentially the same.

Why is this relevant? If you’ve spent any time in the SEO world, you’ve probably heard of the semi-mythical duplication rule. As far as I can tell, CNET and Gizmodo are in duplication’s gray area.

The duplication penalty, or lack thereof

The cautionary tale of duplication generally goes like this: Google wants its search results to give precedence to the most popular/legitimate/relevant pages, and it’s tough to pull that off if the same articles appear on different domains. So Google uses filters to push copycats to the margins. Some people call this the “duplicate penalty,” but that’s a misnomer. Google isn’t slapping hands. Keep reading »

What qualifies as a Spotlight story on Google News? Here’s a few clues

By Mac Slocum

Google News launched a Spotlight section back in September to highlight “in-depth pieces of lasting value.” Initial response was positive, but with a few months under its belt I checked in to see if the feature is living up to that first flush of excitement.

The verdict?

It all depends on how you define “in-depth” and “lasting value.” The material on the page is certainly different from what you typically find on Google News. It’s a nice sample of deeper stories. But visiting the section doesn’t inspire the curiosity and intellectual satisfaction you’d get from a great magazine, newspaper or documentary film. “Lasting” isn’t a word that springs to mind. I’m guessing that has something to do with the algorithm.

Keep reading »

KNC 2010: The Journalism Shop offers vetted editorial talent for hire

By Mac Slocum

[EDITOR'S NOTE: We're highlighting a few of the entries in this year's Knight News Challenge, which just closed Tuesday night. Did you know of an entry worth looking at? Email Mac or leave a brief comment on this post. —Josh]

You may have already heard of The Journalism Shop, the assemblage of ex-Los Angeles Times staffers that has evolved into an editorial matchmaking service. (Its survey of ex-LATers detailing their predictions for the paper’s failure got some notice from Romenesko a couple weeks ago.)

It’s an online co-op where former Times reporters, editors, and designers can hang a freelance shingle and land jobs. The site, which evolved out of an email list for laid-off staffers, currently has around 30 members. And it’s throwing its hat into the ring for a Knight News Challenge grant. According to their application, they hope to build: Keep reading »

KNC 2010: Homicide Watch D.C. focuses reporting on the victims

By Mac Slocum

[EDITOR'S NOTE: We're highlighting a few of the entries in this year's Knight News Challenge, which just closed Tuesday night. Did you know of an entry worth looking at? Email Mac or leave a brief comment on this post. —Josh]

Laura Norton honed her crime-reporting skills in two years as a cops reporter at the Santa Rosa Press-Democrat. Now Norton, a freelancer in Washington, D.C., wants to build a new way to gather information on that city’s murders. (There have been 135 D.C. homicides so far in 2009.)

With Homicide Watch D.C., she wants to aggregate a variety of web-based resources — everything from official court documents to news reports to posts on Facebook and MySpace — and then create layers of context through original reporting. And here’s the hook: All that information will be constructed around the victims, not the crimes.

What she’s proposing is a mashup of crime visualizations, homicide blogs, social media tools, and the online gathering places offered by the likes of Legacy.com. The “victim pages” would be driven by an extensive database custom built for the project. Here’s a rough prototype from Norton’s proposal, built around De’Vante Glober, a 16-year-old shot and killed on Jan. 7: Keep reading »

KNC 2010: Nearly 2,500 proposals, and 65% were in closed category

By Mac Slocum

We’ll have to wait another six months to find out who wins 2010 Knight News Challenge grants, but early data does reveal one key thing: the future of journalism has an abundance of ideas. Nearly 2,500 of them, all told.

The News Challenge received 2,489 proposals for the 2010 contest, according to Jose Zamora, journalism program associate at the Knight Foundation. That’s on par with last year, when there were 2,323.

The big change with the 2010 Challenge, and something we covered previously, was the availability of open and closed submission categories. In an email, Zamora said 65 percent of proposals came through the closed category and 35 percent were open. That’s a pretty big shift from September, when the ratio was roughly reversed — a sign that the late submitters wanted to keep their entries private. Keep reading »

KNC 2010: 101 Source wants your questions and the wisdom of experts

By Mac Slocum

[EDITOR'S NOTE: We're highlighting a few of the entries in this year's Knight News Challenge, which just closed Tuesday night. Did you know of an entry worth looking at? Email Mac or leave a brief comment on this post. —Josh]

Jackie Hai traces the idea for 101 Source back to two projects she worked on while at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Market Meltdown 101 and Economic Stimulus 101 were video-driven websites that featured economic experts explaining complicated ideas in plain language:

Keep reading »

KNC 2010: FollowIndy tries to marry aggregation and geography

By Mac Slocum

[EDITOR'S NOTE: We're highlighting a few of the entries in this year's Knight News Challenge, which just closed Tuesday night. Did you know of an entry worth looking at? Email Mac or leave a brief comment on this post. —Josh]

Former Indianapolis Star software developer Chris Vannoy brings something unusual to his News Challenge application: a fully functional site already built on nights and weekends.

FollowIndy is a hyperlocal aggregator, tapping into the vast web of information published through Twitter, Flickr, news sites, and blogs. Its value is in the limits of its geography: The site only targets news and information relevant to Indianapolis. “Unlike a lot of aggregators that sort of cast a wide net, the idea is to get a very small net that’s aiming for a specific area,” Vannoy said. “It’s about getting a full picture of what’s going on in Indianapolis and then providing some context around what people are talking about.”

Once the sources are pulled into FollowIndy, content is automatically tagged and aggregated, which makes it possible to aggregate all material related to arson, apartment complexes, or Peyton Manning.

Aggregating both professional and personal feeds means Vannoy has data to track how stories are pushed by each — if mainstream media is pushing a story that’s then being picked up by personal users, or vice versa. That’s similar to the Media Cloud project of our friends down the street here at Harvard. For instance, here is a visualization of mentions of the word “flu” in the sources FollowIndy tracks. Notice how mentions spike after The Indianapolis Star mentions is around 24 seconds in: Keep reading »

KNC 2010: NewsGraf wants to slap a search box on journalists’ brains

By Mac Slocum

[EDITOR'S NOTE: The Knight News Challenge closed submissions for the 2010 awards last night at midnight, which means that another batch of great ideas, interesting concepts, and harebrained schemes gave their chance to convince the Knight Foundation they deserve funding. (Trust us — great, interesting, and harebrained are all well represented at this stage each year.) We've been picking through the applications available for public inspection the past few weeks, and over the next few days Mac is going to highlight some of the ideas that struck us as worthy of a closer look — starting today with NewsGraf, below.

But we also want your help. Do you know of a really interesting News Challenge application? Did you submit one yourself? Let us know about it. Either leave a comment on this post or email Mac Slocum. In either case, keep your remarks brief — 200 words or less. We'll run some of the ones you think are noteworthy in a post later this week. —Josh]

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The most eye-catching thing about the NewsGraf’s proposal is its price tag; $950,000 over two years. That stands out in a sea of $50,000 and $100,000 requests.

But if you spend a little time digging into the intricacies of NewsGraf, that big price becomes downright reasonable. Cheap even. That’s because with NewsGraf, Mike Aldax and John Marshall want to digitally duplicate the knowledge, connections and synapses of a veteran journalist. That kind of audacity doesn’t come cheap.

Technologically speaking, NewsGraf ventures into the murky world of semantic tagging and social graphs. Unless you’ve got a computer science degree, it’s hard to get a handle on exactly what NewsGraf is. It’s a database, it’s a search engine, but it’s also a connectivity machine. Keep reading »

Click caps and crawlers: A simple look at two of Google’s recent moves

By Mac Slocum

Discussions involving Google and news organizations took a technical turn this week. Robots.txt files, search crawlers, click caps … I’m guessing most people aren’t intimately familiar with these things (and if you are, this piece isn’t for you). I figured it might be useful to strip away the tech jargon and filter a couple of Google’s latest efforts through a journalism-centric lens.

The First Click Free program now has a five-click cap

Google’s First Click Free model was introduced years ago as a way to level the playing field for subscription-based websites.

Here’s a little background: A publisher who opts in to First Click Free allows a visitor from Google to see the full text of an article that’s housed behind a registration wall (here’s an example; click the ” Oil prices” headline). That same user would encounter a login or subscription prompt if they tried to access the article through a different process, be it via the publisher’s site itself or through another search engine.

There’s upside to First Click Free for publishers and users alike. Publishers get the benefit of inbound Google traffic, a major source of page views and unique visitors. Users see all of the information in an article, not just a headline and snippet. (Dunder Mifflin employees take note.) Keep reading »

How a shift in perspective salvaged Boston.com’s local search project

By Mac Slocum

In 2006, Boston.com launched a local search tool that was supposed to be a big part of the site’s future. The project made perfect sense on paper: Readers would get search results focused on eastern Massachusetts. Those results would mix the best of the machine and human worlds by using algorithms and editors’ picks. Next to the results would be targeted advertising, opening up a lucrative revenue stream. And Boston.com would expand its audience with a useful new service.

Or so the thinking went.

The reality is that Boston.com’s local search never caught on. Traffic lifted a little after launch, but then it plateaued. “It’s been a flat line almost since we started in terms of use,” said Bob Kempf, vice president of product and technology at Boston.com. “It hasn’t really grown.”

Kempf and his team poked at the problem for a year, but an assortment of tweaks didn’t give local search the lift they needed. They eventually reached a diagnosis: Local search was fighting a losing battle against the audience’s expectation of what Boston.com could be.

“We’ve done so well over the last 14 years as a news and information site,” Kempf said. “That’s what people are accustomed to getting from us.” Keep reading »

Need a lawyer? New network gives web publishers a line of defense

By Mac Slocum

If you’ve gone the entrepreneurial route you know that first flush of enthusiasm often dampens when nitty-gritty decisions need to be made. There’s accounting, taxes, incorporation, insurance — and that’s the clear stuff. Toss in murky issues around trademark and branding and it’s easy to see how dreams of independence get squelched.

The Citizen Media Law Project at Harvard’s Berkman Center doesn’t want those entrepreneurial instincts to wither on the vine. It’s just launched an ambitious collection of free legal resources called the Online Media Legal Network (OMLN), the centerpiece of which is a matchmaking service that connects online publishers with attorneys who can address their specific needs. It’s a full-service effort, covering everything from basic business structure to contracts to representation in court.

OMLN is open to any online publisher that meets the network’s requirements. Organizations must be independent, journalism-minded, and have an eye toward sustainability either as for-profit businesses or nonprofits. If that describes your outfit, you can start the application process here.

The really good news is that pro bono assistance is available and the thresholds are generous. For-profit organizations that make less than $100,000 gross annual revenue qualify, as do nonprofits with operating budgets under $250,000. The high ceiling should cover the growing legion of bootstrapped web publishers.

“As long as their work is in the public interest, as long as it involves adherence to journalistic standards, then they’re going to be able to get help through the network until they’ve grown to the point where they are no longer entitled to free services,” said our friend David Ardia, the Project’s director. Keep reading »

How a blog, a camera, and a court are feeding journalism’s long tail

By Mac Slocum

When people talk about the long tail, they often focus on consumer goods, where the infinite shelf space at a company like Amazon or Netflix allows a huge variety of products to be sold. But the same concept can apply to news, where cheap servers make it possible for hyper-targeted coverage — the stuff that only appeals to a few hundred people — to live online with few concerns about space or scarcity. Toss in search engines and dead-simple publishing tools and you’ve got a bounty of easy-to-find, niche-friendly content.

Whether intended or not, Ron Sylvester is stocking the long tail. The veteran crime and courts reporter for The Wichita Eagle uses his blog What the Judge Ate for Breakfast to publish two-minute videos that dive into the intricacies of a courthouse. They’re fascinating clips, touching on everything from the role of prosecutors, to odd defendant behavior, to the less glamorous responsibilities judges assume. These glimpses into the life of a court are classic examples of long tail content: the type of stuff that would never see the light of day on traditional platforms.

It makes sense that something like this would come from Sylvester. He was one of the first beat reporters to jump on the Twitter bandwagon, tweeting updates from the courtroom. The positive response to the Twitter coverage encouraged him, and he started looking at different techniques for covering his beat. “There’s so much human drama in the courthouse,” he said. “I’m trying to find ways to expand the coverage and use multimedia to do that.” Keep reading »

Downie and Schudson’s 6 steps toward “reconstructing” journalism

By Mac Slocum

We are not lacking deep lamentations and grand plans for the future of journalism (clever commentary is abundant as well). New additions to this canon appear weekly, and many have a reactionary bent with lots of chest thumping and hand wringing. It’s often a bit much — which is why the appearance of a long-view, measured report is a welcome palate cleanser. 

“The Reconstruction of American Journalism” (download PDF here) sets its sights wholly on local news. It’s built on the thesis that the accountability journalism found in local newspapers offers the most value to communities, and the most risk if it disappears. 

Beyond the focus on local newspaper coverage, the report is also notable for what it largely ignores: co-authors Leonard Downie, Jr., former Washington Post executive editor, and Michael Schudson, Columbia University professor and MacArthur fellow, offer little significant discussion on advertising, subscriptions, or for-profit models. Paywalls and micropayments get only passing mentions. The report’s six closing recommendations are instead built around private donations, foundation grants, and the repositioning of academic and government systems. Seeing as most journalism is still funded by market-driven models, this is an interesting comment-by-omission.

C.W. Anderson, research assistant on the report and a contributor to this site, told me the report’s intent is to find solutions that can maintain the previous model and its accompanying accountability journalism.

“There is no market solution obvious right now that will provide the same level of subsidy to journalism that existed under the monopoly paper model,” Anderson said. “So on some level, all the back and forth about new business models is fighting over table scraps. And so that allowed us to quickly return to the question of what we should do given actually existing cases of market failure.”

I spent a couple hours parsing the report’s high points and jotting down observations (see below). As is always the case with this kind of thing, a cursory overview is no substitute for your own in-depth read. Keep reading »

What lit mag McSweeney’s could teach news orgs about the iPhone

By Mac Slocum

You’d think selling subscriptions within iPhone applications would appeal to media companies: It’s a model that promises recurring revenue streams, and it matches up nicely with the way they’ve always done business in print. But surprisingly few have jumped at the opportunity; most news organizations seem to be sticking with traditional one-off apps — some paid, most not.

More surprising still is that McSweeney’s — the independent book/periodical publisher best known for its association with Dave Eggers and a predisposition toward narrow columns of text — is one of the first publishing-centric companies to capitalize on the possibilities that came with the most recent iPhone software update, including in-app purchasing and push notification. Apparently, the road to the future has aesthetic sensibilities — and maybe some lessons for news companies. Keep reading »

Is NBC preparing to compete with its affiliates? Evidence from Boston

By Mac Slocum

The web has disrupted the way news organizations think about geography and concepts like “national” and “local.” National newspapers like The New York Times and Wall Street Journal are planning local editions in the Bay Area and elsewhere, where online competition has weakened local newspapers. National brands like ESPN and the Huffington Post are launching dedicated websites in some of the country’s biggest markets. The Associated Press is considering withholding some of its material from local members and instead building a centralized AP site for them to link to.

Now there’s evidence that a national TV network may be headed in the same geography-muddling direction.

Take a look at this job listing for a Boston city editor. It’s for a job at NBC Local Media, the network arm that has built “locals only” sites like NBC Los Angeles and NBC New York. From the job description, it would seem evident that NBC Boston can’t be far behind.

Why would an NBC Boston be any different from the network’s other sites in major metros? The existing 10 sites are all in markets where NBC owns its local station — they’re O&Os, TV parlance for owned-and-operated by the network. But NBC’s Boston station, WHDH, is just an NBC affiliate, owned by Sunbeam Television. And it appears NBC Boston is designed for the network to compete with its own affiliate in its market — online, at least.

Chris Wayland, WHDH general manager, confirmed to me his station has had zero involvement with the development of a new NBC Boston site and said it will include no local news produced by WHDH staff. And he said if the network decides to launch its own Boston presence, it would have no plans to shut down the station’s own website, WHDH.com. (In the existing NBC O&O markets, local stations have merged their sites into the network-branded sites; call-letter URLs like www.wnbc.com now redirect to NBC Local domains.) Keep reading »

Philadelphia tech site tries to put its news startup theories into practice

By Mac Slocum

Technically Philly looks like a prototype plucked from an entrepreneurial journalism textbook. The website offers targeted coverage. The founders nurture their community, online and off. In-progress revenue streams are smartly diversified across advertising and services. 

But what if you did everything right, implemented all your ideas, and the business still didn’t catch on? That’s the concern for Technically Philly’s founders, Sean Blanda, Christopher Wink and Brian James Kirk.

Blanda is blunt about their prospects. “Our biggest challenge in the next few months is that we’re going to roll out all of our ideas for how a niche product can be profitable, and we’re going to know if Technically Philly will work as a business,” he said. “We’re looking for evidence this business is sustainable.”

This stark but common refrain is the same one that sends squeamish entrepreneurs back to their imperfect-but-secure employers. But the guys behind Technically Philly didn’t have jobs to cling to; all three confronted a desolate market when they graduated from Temple University. (Blanda has since landed a full-time gig; Kirk and Wink are freelancing). Barring an unexpected media turnaround, their path will be walked by many others.  Keep reading »

Charlottesville nonprofit finds a path to a bigger audience: the local paper

By Mac Slocum

In online-nonprofit-news terms, Charlottesville Tomorrow is an old timer. It’s been covering the growth and development around the Virginia city since 2005 — back when “twitter” was still a term confined to ornithological circles.

Born from executive director Brian Wheeler’s interest in local government (he serves as chairman of the county school board), the privately-funded Charlottesville Tomorrow isn’t just hyperlocal — it’s hypertargeted. No social calendars, no little-league scores, no general local news — just growth and development, covered at a level of detail no one else can match.

That focus helped Charlottesville Tomorrow build a positive reputation in the community and relationships with local media organizations, whose resources to cover those issues have shrunk. And one of those relationships recently became official: Charlottesville Tomorrow in August partnered with the local daily newspaper, The Daily Progress, to publish Charlottesville Tomorrow content in the Progress’ print and online editions.

Daily Progress managing editor McGregor McCance had Charlottesville Tomorrow on his radar for years. “It was a case where I was able to review them over a long period of time and personally get comfortable with what they were producing,” McCance said. “It wasn’t as if someone had hopped in the door here and said ‘hey, we’d like to start writing stories for the Daily Progress, what do you think?’”

This isn’t a nonprofit flirtation or limited trial run. Since early September, around 40 percent of Charlottesville Tomorrow’s articles have appeared in the Progress’ newspaper and website. No money has changed hands under the partnership, and both sides are fine with that. Wheeler sees it as an opportunity to get the Charlottesville Tomorrow brand in front of more people, while McGregor can integrate reputable growth and development articles into the Progress’ local coverage. Keep reading »

YouTube’s local-news vids get clicks, show some serious traffic potential

By Mac Slocum

With 20 hours of video uploaded to YouTube every minute, there’s bound to be some useful local news in there. Finding it is another matter.

Toward that end, YouTube earlier this year rolled out a News Near You feature that showcases local stories from media outlets and independent reporters. I checked in with Steve Grove, head of YouTube’s news and politics, to see how the feature is faring.

The numbers are noteworthy: According to Grove, videos within the News Near You box on YouTube’s news page garner, on average, a 5-10 percent click-through rate. Doing some rough math (completely unofficial and for demonstration purposes only): If one percent of YouTube’s estimated 11.8 million daily U.S. visitors goes to the news section, that’s an audience of 118,000. Applying the 5-10 percent click-through rate, between 6,000 and 12,000 people view videos through News Near You on a daily basis.

That’s not exactly a 30-second Super Bowl spot; view numbers for the videos we see in the feature in Boston are often in the double digits. But News Near You does offer local media a low-effort platform that attracts a geographically-relevant audience. And its key selling point is its potential upside.

News Near You only appears on a single page within YouTube’s traffic-friendly domain. Imagine if it were pushed to additional sections of the site: The potential audience would go through the roof if a local news module were added to YouTube’s video playback pages. Grove said this sort of expansion has been discussed, but there’s no timetable in place. Keep reading »

Shhh! About one third of Knight News Challenge proposals are secret

By Mac Slocum

You’ve still got two weeks to come up with the brilliant idea that’ll save journalism — or, to be more realistic, an idea that’ll earn some Knight Foundation cash and let you try something new and innovative. And unlike last year, you can choose to keep that idea secret until the cash arrives.

That’s because the 2010 Knight News Challenge includes a private submission option, which allows proposals to remain secret from the date of submission until the News Challenge’s winners are announced in June. And people are taking advantage: While exact numbers are in flux as applications come in, as of late last week between 30 and 40 percent of applications had arrived via the new “closed” category.

Last year — the third round of the News Challenge — all applications were public from submission through the multistage judging process. That was itself a shift from the previous year, when Knight included a category for commercial projects that allowed closed entries. Kebbel said that was dropped because the competition’s strengths did not overlap with the needs of revenue-minded start-ups.

“Looking back on the second year, when we had both open and closed, the ultimate winners were fairly well split between the categories,” said Gary Kebbel, journalism program officer at the Knight Foundation. “More winners came from open, but a very significant minority was closed.”

The revised closed option is an attempt to broaden the appeal of the News Challenge to more applicants. Those might include people concerned about their ideas being co-opted before a project is released, or employed journalists who plan to leave their jobs if they win (but stay if they lose).

One thing that isn’t changing: Closed projects that win the 2010 competition must still adhere to the News Challenge’s requirements to open source their underlying code (an issue of some debate this summer) and release all supporting documentation under Creative Commons licenses. And when it comes time to select winners, closed and open applications will be competing in the same pool. Keep reading »

Hope you’re “intrigued” by this post: Moods in the spotlight on NBC Local

By Mac Slocum

New York is furious about the mayor’s new Twitter habit, Chicago is snickering at an Oprah lawsuit, and Los Angeles continues to mourn the passing of director John Hughes.

These city-wide emotional check-ins are plucked from NBC’s recently launched local web network. The network’s 10 sites, all associated with NBC owned-and-operated broadcast stations, feature “mood” applications that capture audience sentiment at the story level. Think of it as a hybrid approach: combining the structure and ease of web polls with the strong emotions typically found in user comments.

Tapping and featuring audience emotions is part of NBC’s effort to redraw the boundaries of participation on its local sites. “The city web sites are designed to capture the real-time pulse of the city,” says Greg Gittrich, vice president of content and editor in chief of NBC Local Integrated Media. “The stories we cover are a big part of that, but how our audience reacts to the stories is also significant. So we started looking at ways to elevate the voice of the users and give them meaningful ways to impact and influence the sites.”

Here’s how the mood application works: Visit a story on an NBC local site and look for the adjacent mood bar that notes current voting in six categories: furious, sad, bored, thrilled, intrigued, and laughing. Cast your own vote through the accompanying drop-down menu and watch as percentages update accordingly. That’s all there is to it on the user’s end. Keep reading »