The possibility is to produce totally versioned news-on-paper, deliver it the next morning and sell if for about 2Euros an issue. I think it’s worth watching. If it works as expected it means that ultra small run newspaper product could be delivered to the non mass communities of interest you allude to the address.

If that’s true, I think the opportunity to tap a new market of local business advertisers as well as brands that want to speak to a very specific community can be brought back into the advert market.

Given the latest advances in 2d codes ( QR ) the path is seems clear for print to deliver clickstreams that can deliver the “metrics advertisers need.

I read a much more pessimistic view today, at http://www.mondaynote.com/2009/11/01/the-hyper-local-digital-journalism/

I agree with Frédéric Filloux that reporting packaged stories on a hyper-local basis is a very difficult task.

But, as we are exploring with our C3 initiative, creating individual value at a specific moment and place is valuable, so long as the information is created in super-tagged particles in the first instance – the “atoms” of the “cells” of the multi-cellular network.

I love the bit about The Farmer and The Farmer’s Wife. It reminds me of a passage in this 1981 book on the New Media in Society, talking about a Kentucky Farmer’s evening information management: 3 hours of sorting mail and reading subscriptions, and seen as very important to his livelhood, much like your coffee. I bet that same farmer (or his children?) spend much more time than that on the internet today, and have much better, more specific information available to them. I’m also (wildly) guessing, however, that that individual information processing habit is not nearly as industrious and focused. So far beyond just media-production, we may gain from a cultural and educational discussion of our individual media-diets, and how each person can best assess what’s valuable for them and what they want and need out of their information consumption. Just b/c I’ve ended up in a habit of spending $4 on mocha biancas doesn’t mean that’s really the best fit for me.

I’m also struck by how much more powerful your historical narrative is because it’s anchored in Minnesota. Obviously, that was a necessity for your venue, but even though it’s not my context, it makes it a more effective and concrete a narrative for me–the details might be wildly different for Northern California, but the arc is probably the same, and the localization makes it more vivid and conceivable. This sort of reiterates your larger point: context and localization add cognitive value, elevating content from a bucket of generic grafs to stories that inspire and stimulate.