These are the highlights:

1. (CHAI|TE?E?A?)[ -]?B.*(A|U).*G.*G?(E.*R|I.*N.*G?|E.*D)?.*S?
2. d(i|1|\|)ck(less|head|wad|weed)?
3. (m(o|u)th(a|er))?(F|PH)[aeiouv\-\.\*':@]+.*C?.*K(E?R?S?|I?N?G?|FACE|HEAD)
4. (jack|bad|dumb|fat)?(a|@).*[\$sz8x].*[\$sz8x].*e?.*(\$|s|z)?
5. (dip|dog|chicken)?[\$s]?.*h.*[i\|1!-@a]+.*t(ty|t|head|eating)?s?

“I got an awesome message — a woman at a hotel room in Arvada, her alarm clock broke and she called because she wanted to know if it was Thursday or Friday. She left a voicemail, and included her phone number.”

1. Provide context about the exact place that I live. Context makes information actionable.
2. Make accessible and linkable historical information about the place that I live. News sites are a community resource — time to start acting like one.
3. Give news sites exponentially more entry points to the information they’re already publishing. More entry points makes information more findable.
4. Make local political news and information more accessible. This makes politics more approachable and actionable to those not already disposed to follow it.

1. An index of all the facts included in the articles they publish

This means a list of facts, as well as a means to link directly to the part in the article that fact exists.

Example: McDonald’s buys more than 3 billion pounds of potatoes annually across the globe. This nugget of information is more interesting than the article’s headline, McDonald’s seeks better ‘tater for its French fries, yet it was left embedded in the article body for only the most curious to find.

Indexing facts does more than provide new and engaging entry points to existing content. Facilitating easy citations with facts and links to facts can improve the quality of conversations on news-site article comments, and it can also encourage wikipedia users to cite the news site with the tools that make it easy to cite.

2. News archives. Not just from the last month — from the last year, ten years, fifty years, century.

Every local news-dot-com publishing with a newspaper is sitting on a goldmine of archived content. The New York Times hired reCaptcha to help digitize their archives — sure, the NYT’s web strategy doesn’t always align with that of local news-dot-coms, but in this case, they’re onto something.

3. Indexes of news and information by zip code

Denver’s a decently big city. We’ve got 72 neighborhoods and xx zip codes. If there were a place I could go to get all the news, calendar events, and classified listings in my zip code, I would. Not only that, I would tell my neighbors about it. Indexing by zip codes gives a hook for loyal readers to introduce your site to the people that live around them that may not care for your publication, and it gives the non-loyal readers, the non-news junkies a compelling reason to visit.

4. Indexes of information on local politicians, organized by politician.

I don’t care about your catch-all “local politics” category. I care about about the politicians that represent me, and I want an easy way to find out everything they’re doing. That means not just local politicians either — that means the people repping me in the statehouse, my U.S. House representative and my U.S. senator.

Looking at “local” as a catch-all bucket rather than a collection of specific and distinct pieces is a superficial approach to publishing.

The New York Times’ Represent application approaches local politics in a mature and fully fleshed manner.

Here are some examples of catch-all local politics buckets:

• Denver Post: Local Politics
• Boston Herald: Local Politics
• Dallas Morning News: Local Politics

5. Indexes of major crimes, by date, with crime stats aggregated by month, year and every type of location that’s available (county, zip code, neighborhood, street, block etc.).

Yes, this is the type of information you see Everyblock and Adrian Holovaty pushing online. I’m not saying publish data-driven presentations of all crimes — I’m saying start with the big ones, see how that works, and go from there. Publishing per-capita rates for violent crimes opens a window on urban vs. suburban living, on what’s happening in the places we call home and work, and how these incidents trend over time.

I’m going to repeat that: How these incidents trend over time. Crime drives a large part of the news truck, but so often it’s crime without context. Now that local news is online, it has the opportunity to give context to the information it publishes. What would this context do? Turn crime news from the hand-wringing / rubberneck activity and make the crime information actionable. If arson has increased 200% in my zipcode (80204) in the last year, that’s worth asking my police department and local government about.

We don’t know where our online headlines will end up. Our article headlines are what the search engines use to figure out what we’re talking about. In print, you have all sorts of context. Online your context is not guaranteed. The headline is the most-often piece of linked text, which means it’s got to be able to stand by itself in the middle of nowhere dot com and still make sense.

With that in mind, here are some tips on making headlines work better on the web. The examples included are from the morning’s headlines on denverpost.com, and all of them have since been fixed (thanks, Demetria):

Use place names and people names as often as possible.

Labels like “city” and “state” should never be a headline’s only word used to describe location. Be specific. Column widths don’t control your pen like they did in the past.

• Example: “Growers cheer as rains put state totals near norm” works much better when it’s “Growers cheer as rains put Colorado totals near norm”
• Ex: “Police investigate two-way mirrors in apartment” makes no sense on its own, “Montrose police investigate two-way mirrors in apartment” helps a little more.
• Ex: “More farmers losing hope” could apply to farmers anywhere in the world. “More Colorado farmers losing hope” fixes that.
• Ex: “Justice not on city’s to-do list” could apply to any city. “Justice not on Denver’s to-do list” makes it clear which on we’re talking about.
• Ex: “Lottery a loser in current economy.” — “Colorado lottery a loser in current economy”
• Ex: “Star’s status does affect at-risk kids” — “Brandon Marshall’s star status does affect at-risk kids”

Abbreviations make sense to us, and the people who are familiar with us. They may not make sense to search engines, or the non-Denver Post lingo savvy.

• Example: ‘Girlfriend sentenced in “boob job” murder plot in Springs’ — ‘Girlfriend sentenced in “boob job” murder plot in Colorado Springs’ is much more explicit about the location, and that this happened in Colorado.
• Ex: ‘No doubt Nugs are for real’ is not hard to turn into ‘No doubt Nuggets are for real’

Puns are nonsense, and explicit trumps cutesy 95% of the time.

Here are some cutesy heds — try imagining if you saw those links on a list of headlines, and whether you have enough information about what’s on the other side of that click to consider making that click.

• Example: “High dudgeon — and other bits”
• Ex: “Hard slog on dimes and nickels”
• Ex: “Heart was dialed in on caring”
• Ex: “Forget that game, but not this team”

Watch out for label headlines.

If you have a label headline, often there’s a subhead, and often that subhead is what should be the headline online.

• Example: “Facebook time travel” — this one had a great subhead, “Old friends are new again using social networking — from the comfort of their own laptop”. There are a couple ways to approach this rewrite, and “Facebook time travel: Old friends are new again using social networking” gets the point across best.
• Ex: “Hoop Dreams” could have easily been “Hula Hoop Dreams: A rigorous workout with meditative benefits puts a new spin on an old toy”

If you’ve got any more resources about writing headlines for online, or suggestions, add ‘em in the comments below.

Reading this followed my discovery of the Kankakee Daily Journal‘s site, which allows comments on the two or three grafs of articles they provide online — the rest of the word-based news is tucked behind the pay e-edition wall.

I’m asking myself: Is PDF-style delivery really the future of newspapers? The e-edition PDFs are attractive to newspapers — they look like the print edition, and they contribute to print-circ numbers. But they also ignore the possibilities of online advertising, which is a glaring problem with many newspaper-dot-coms.

When you hide your information behind a pay-wall or registration-wall, you’re penalizing people’s money or time for access to your stuff.

Charging for your content penalizes all involved in the linking / recommending of that content.

Next, you have these two favorite paragraphs from Berners-Lee’s piece on Net Neutrality:

Control of information is hugely powerful. In the US, the threat is that companies control what I can access for commercial reasons. (In China, control is by the government for political reasons.) There is a very strong short-term incentive for a company to grab control of TV distribution over the Internet even though it is against the long-term interests of the industry.

Yes, regulation to keep the Internet open is regulation. And mostly, the Internet thrives on lack of regulation. But some basic values have to be preserved. For example, the market system depends on the rule that you can’t photocopy money. Democracy depends on freedom of speech. Freedom of connection, with any application, to any party, is the fundamental social basis of the Internet, and, now, the society based on it.

Read the whole article, Net Neutrality: This is serious, here.

To Whom It May Concern:

I currently live in Springfield, Anystate. I work full time and am a part time student. I just had a gentleman stop by my house to offer me a FREE subscription to the Local Times for this semester and the only I would have to pay for is $.50/week to pay the deliverer. I kindly declined his offer because I am just not interested. I read my news online and I was just not interested in the offer. Here is how our conversation continued:

Seller: But you’re a student, right?

Me: Yes, but I’m just not interested.

Seller: But it is just $.50 a week. Fifty-cents!

Me: Thank you, but no thank you.

Seller: proceeded to share his head, turn to go down the stairs and then whistled (not a cheery tune, mind you, but a whistle that a person does when he just can’t believe something) and then he mumbled something

Me: Excuse me, sir, what did you say? Did you just say that I was retarded?

Seller: No, I said that people around here are retarded. Have a nice day.

Me: Sir!

Seller: Oh, don’t take offense. You’re not the only one. We usually only get 8 out of 10. Have a nice day.

Me: Get a life.

I am NOT impressed!! What kind of person is this? I’m afraid that I don’t even know his name and I’m not even sure if he works directly for you or if he works for the university. Either way, it reflects upon YOU. I just wanted to mention this so that if you knew of who it was you could possibly mention that that kind of service isn’t impressive.

Thank you for your time on this matter.

Sincerely,
Angelina Clinton

When I visit PressDemocrat.com, I go for one thing: Sonoma County news. Someone in Mendocino County might visit the site for Mendo County news, which is great, but not the reason I visit. Ok, with that said, how do I locate Sonoma County news on PressDemocrat.com. Ahh… herein lies the problem. Local news granularity is sorely missing on the site.

When scrolling down PressDemocrat.com’s frontpage, you won’t find sections for “Santa Rosa news” or “Windsor news”

When I worked at the Winston-Salem newspaper, we had sections for each of the counties we covered, and I’m pretty sure we had feeds for each of them. One of our managers suggested getting rid of them — the traffic wasn’t particularly high to any one of the sections…. however, if you added the traffic to all of the county-based sections together, it was traffic worth considering.

And if you like that anecdote, I’ve got another. Denver’s Rocky Mountain News, despite their “Closer To Home” slogan and (some say) general reputation for being more focused on the local, has no place-based online sections or place-based RSS feeds. The Denver Post, my employer, has both. The Post had place-based RSS feeds for the Denver Metro area before I started working there in October 2006.

I don’t get it — you’re a local news organization, you publish most of your information about a specific place on this planet, yet you do nothing to highlight, filter, or organize your place-based information? These city- / county- / neighborhood- / street- / block-based news feeds are just the tip of the location-based information iceberg. What can you do with a dateline? With a locator map? With a photo? A crime blotter? A classified ad? A banner ad? A calendar entry?

I wrote about some of this at the beginning of 2008 in this blog post, Three ways that online changes the “Where?” question, journalistically. I’m working on answers in my day-job, some of the time. If you’ve got ideas for a non-day-job project related to this, let me know.

The Onion’s making a push into the online local entertainment markets of ten cities — Madison, Milwaukee, Chicago and Austin already, and Los Angeles, New York, Washington D.C., San Francisco, Denver and the Twin Cities to come, says The Onion’s press release from PR Newswire.

They’re changing the name from AV Club to The Decider. You can see Chicago’s “Decider” site live here. Notice the decider.com domain — why they decided to use a new domain name and not cash in on the existing search-engine cred of theonion.com I have no idea.

So, beside the news that there’s another face in the local-entertainment-guide information game, the other interesting bit (which I heard from a friend of mine) is The Onion is taking all the market-specific articles they’ve published in the AV Club’s archives, and publishing them anew online. The advantage there is that these sites launch with more than just a front page and a handful of articles… also, it’s more information for search engines to index… also, and this is just me thinking out loud, I wonder why other print media with extensive archives don’t take advantage of that gold mine of existing, low-overhead, local information?