Street Fight Daily: Seattle PD Tap Hyperlocal Tweets, Armstrong Talks Patch
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal content, commerce, and technology.
Hey, @SeattlePD: What’s the Latest? (New York Times)
The Seattle Police Department, which presides over one of the nation’s more tech-savvy — if not saturated — cities, is diving in to find out, in a project that began last week with 51 hyper-local neighborhood Twitter accounts providing moment-to-moment crime reports. The project, called Tweets-by-beat, is the most ambitious effort of its kind in the nation, authorities in law enforcement and social media say, transforming the pen and ink of the old police blotter into the bits and bytes of the digital age.
AOL’s Tim Armstrong Talks Ads, Patch, and HuffPost Live (AdWeek)
The CEO dismissed media criticism of the local network, which has covered Patch’s failure to turn a profit thus far (Patch is reported to have lost $147 million in 2011) and made pains to paint it as not only a sound investment, but an agent for positive community change. “Reality is that Patch has probably done more for local communities than any other online entity,” he told the crowd, noting the platform’s ability to connect a community.
The Future of Mobile News (Project for Excellence in Journalism)
Half of all U.S. adults now have a mobile connection to the web through either a smartphone or tablet, significantly more than a year ago, and this has major implications for how news will be consumed and paid for, according to a detailed new survey of news use on mobile devices by the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism (PEJ) in collaboration with The Economist Group. More than four in ten mobile news consumers say they are getting more news now and nearly a third say they are adding new sources.
How Groupon Can Save Itself (Fast Company)
This is the crux of Groupon’s problem: most businesses don’t know how to implement a retention strategy. In effect, Groupon shouted, “Hey, we want to help you grow!” But it left its customers hanging when it came to real growth, which is measured more in retention than in new customer acquisition.
Kiip Is The Perfect Company To Show Off The Potential Of Apple Passbook. Take A Look. (TechCrunch)
Kiip is the reward platform that works with both developers and advertisers to bring app users rewards for meeting certain milestones in a game or other app on both iOS and Android devices. It is now integrated with passbook, which means the your earned rewards will now be easily accessible within Passbook.
Beyond Ads: How Newspapers Survive In Digital (MediaPost)
Jonty Kelt: The source of the increasing bullishness, as suggested in Murdoch’s comment, is simple: newspapers — as trusted sources of news and recommendations for local audiences — have begun to understand how to leverage their unique position at the nexus of digital content and commerce. Rather than simply relying on revenue from an ad unit to send a consumer to another Web site, newspapers have begun to realize that they themselves possess all the necessary resources to own the entire e-commerce transaction.
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