Street Fight Daily: More Journatic Drama, New Hyperlocal Co-op

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A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal content, commerce, and technology.

Chicago Tribune Discovers Plagiarism, Suspends Work with Journatic (Poynter)
One of Journatic’s editorial leaders, Mike Fourcher, announced Saturday morning that he has resigned from the outsourcing company because he and the company’s founders “fundamentally disagree about ethical and management issues as they relate to a successful news business.” Journatic said late Saturday that it had planned to fire Fourcher before he resigned.

Banyan Project Planning Its First Community-owned News Co-op (Nieman Lab)
Later this year, a community news site based on an entirely different ownership model is scheduled to debut in Haverhill, Mass., a blue-collar city of 60,000 about 45 minutes north of Boston on the New Hampshire line. The site, to be called Haverhill Matters, will be cooperatively owned, similar to a credit union or a food co-op. Neither for-profit nor nonprofit, the site, if it is to succeed, will depend on the goodwill and support of its members.

The Most Obvious Mobile Ad Unit and What the New York Times Got Wrong (Both Sides of the Table)
Mark Suster: An even more interesting thing about phone calls – and one that is about the future rather than the past which is why I think the Times reporter would have missed it by not asking the right people – mobile devices are likely to drive up inbound calls dramatically if companies like Google, Twitter and Facebook that abhor phone calls can grok this trend.

That’s No Phone. That’s My Tracker. (Nieman Lab)
Thanks to the explosion of GPS technology and smartphone apps, smartphone devices are also taking note of what we buy, where and when we buy it, how much money we have in the bank, whom we text and e-mail, what Web sites we visit, how and where we travel, what time we go to sleep and wake up — and more. If someone knows exactly where you are, they probably know what you are doing.

Knight Delivers Tool to Track Local Notables (NetNewsCheck)
The Knight News Innovation Lab’s newest tool, Local Angle, cross references Google News with Wikipedia to help journalists discover stories happening on the national level that have local interest, specifically stories concerning local celebrities or notable residents making news.

With Digg Done, Questions on Yelp (Market Watch)
“What Yelp is doing isn’t all that unique,” analyst Roger Kay of Endpoint Technologies Associates said of the site which allows users to post reviews on businesses. The “likely outcome for Yelp is to be acquired one of these days. Apple could buy Yelp and hook it up to Siri.”

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