Patch - a local journalism startup funded by Google exec Tim Armstrong

This is an interesting development. Tim Armstrong, Google’s advertising executive, has put his personal investment fund behind a startup called Patch, which aims to create small teams of journalists producing local news in communities all over the US. Right now, the company has 3 Patches deployed, in South Orange, Maplewood, and Millburn, New Jersey. The pictures aren’t great, but it’s great to hear about innovation in journalism. From the about page:

We’re a community-specific news and information platform dedicated to providing comprehensive and trusted local coverage for individual towns and communities.

We want to make your life better by giving you quick access to the information that’s most relevant to you. Patch makes it easy to:

• Keep up with news and events
• Look at photos and videos from around town
• Learn about local businesses
• Participate in discussions
• Submit your own announcements, photos, and reviews

Looking at Patch’s main staff, it’s mostly engineers and advertising people behind the scenes, which makes sense. Leave the journalists to do the reporting…

Hard to say where this will go, and I’m especially curious to see what sort of copyright arrangements will be reached between contributors and Patch.

(via Valleywag)

The New York Times (prototype) Article Skimmer

Ooooh, this is nice. The New York Times has developed a new prototype site, the Article Skimmer, as an alternative display of the day’s news, and it’s beautiful, though it could do with a few more pictures. Sure, they’ll need to figure out a place or two for ads, but if a couple of those boxes are given over to advertisements, I won’t complain too much. There’s a release announcement and news about the feature at the NYT’s First Look Blog. Via waxy.org, who rightly points out that this is much easier to use than the front page of nytimes.com.

One of my favorite magazines of the year, the New York Times Sunday Magazine’s annual Year in Ideas issue, is out this Sunday. The web version is already up, and I can’t wait to work my way through it. Spray on condoms, a vending machine for crows, mini-cattle, moonvertising, and eating kangaroos to help the environment make the cut.