EveryBlock teams up with New York Times

In “Tools for the Investigative Journalist,” I listed a few online resources to assist journalists with their reporting. One of those was EveryBlock, which provides news alerts down to the neighborhood level.

Today, EveryBlock announced that it has partnered with The New York Times to provide political news at the EveryBlock: New York City site. From the announcement:

This new section, “political news items,” notifies you whenever your local elected representatives — such as your city councilman or state assemblyman — are mentioned in The New York Times.

Alt-weeklies that had a healthy 2008

Editor & Publisher looks at 10 alt-weeklies that saw revenue growth in 2008. For most, the increases were driven by a combination of display ad sales and special issues.

Included in the story were The Athens (Ohio) News, Boulder Weekly, Illinois Times, Mountain Xpress, NUVO (Indianapolis alt-weekly), Pacific Northwest Inlander, Portland Phoenix, San Luis Obispo New Times, Santa Fe Reporter, and Seven Days (Burlington, Vt.)

Kudos to my former colleague and intrepid reporter Alex Pickett for alerting me to this story.

New York Times deja vu

If the New York Times‘ fine story “What Do Women Want?,” published January 22, seems a tad familiar, there’s a reason.

The Times published a story titled ”What Women Want (Maybe),” on June 12, 2008, which was also about women’s sexual responses and also cited one of the current article’s quoted researchers, Dr. Meredith Chivers.

Let’s hope for the Times‘ sake that women never cease to be a mystery.

Big ideas for increasing online ad revenue

Tim Windsor, director of digital strategy for The Johns Hopkins University, has a great post over at Nieman Journalism Lab on how media companies can increase local ad revenue through innovative partnerships with local businesses.

Some of Windsor’s recommendations include ad aggregation, teaching advertisers to use social media, and commercial/sponsored blogs.

To help clarify my understanding of the issue, I left this comment for Windsor: