Thursday, March 12

REFRESH RATES (7#) -

Shifting to digital . . .

a new hyper-local outfit called Patch is expanding its New Jersey territory. Will it work? I think it may work for some towns, but not for others.

# Gillian Reagan reports that Jimmy Fallon, who recently took over the late night spot at NBC TV is into geeky stuff, including Twitter, which he has been featuring on his show. I haven't been watching it, but this morning on Local NBC affiliate Channel 6 in South Florida, the presenters were promoting their new Twitter accounts!

When I dropped into The NY Observer this afternoon, my visual scan of their stories this week was once again repeatedly disrupted by them reloading the page even though nothing on it had changed. Websites do this, I understand, to inflate their view statistics just as hard copy publications were caught padding their circulation figures. I consider it a nasty habit and wish they would stop doing it.

# Mark Potts thinks Hearst's handling of the Seattle P-I situation is needlessly cruel. His blog entry was picked up by Romenesko. My sense of it is that Hearst may be in much worse condition than they are publicly disclosing and that they may be discussing a Chapter 11 reorganization process - but I could be completely wrong.

# Columbia J school's internal turmoil
with regard to New Media techniques.

# Ron James who ran the SignOnSanDiego
website for eight years is heading a new
hyper-local venture out there called SNN.

# More about JoJo Ahmed, the reporter
who was just killed, and a nice photo of him.

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