Here's a cool story for you. The local newspaper was ordered by a local judge recently to give up the name of one of their anonymous posters or at least the name of the company the plaintiff needs to go after for the information. The forums for the CNHI run newspaper are handled by a third party - Groupee's HeyMartha forums.

This is a few days old. I missed it for some reason and my buddy who runs the site (Al Jordan - the Computer Dude) didn't mention it. It's big news in my eyes, though. Another example of the people formerly known as the audience reporting news. Of course, a couple people said we'll have to wait on the paper to find out what happened, but still...

Made a small breakthrough today. Someone in the car vertical jumped on board with the next print edition. It's the smallest ad (they seem to be testing waters), but the fact we got them to sign a check is good, I think. Other bigger advertisers are being courted. Again, it's going slower than I thought, but I have the fact that my product is brand new against me.

Ok, here you go, a PDF of the first copy of AFP Print. Selling of the second issue is going. Could be worse and could be better, but it's positive overall. Takes time to build relationships with local businesses.

We're continuing to break news - a few fires and a robbery - beating the newspaper by a couple hours usually. And I say we because it's not me - it's people on the AFP Scanner News thread. I want to do more with the idea, but they like it just fine as it is. If it isn't broke, don't fix it, they told me. Heh.

It happened again. Maybe it's not a fluke? Three different posters tonight broke a robbery at a local tobacco store. About an hour and a half later the Anderson Herald Bulletin had a complete story, but it broke at AFP. Be different some of the members of the site told me last Friday when we met in person.

By Mark Choate
Orig. Posted to Online-News

There is a fundamental economic law at work here: more competition means lower profits. Less competition means higher profits. For many years, newspapers operated in what economists would call an environment of monopolistic competition. Monopolistic competition is defined as a market in which there are only a few providers of a particular good or service, and these providers offer highly differentiated versions of these products. This contrasts with pure competition, in which there are numerous providers of a good or service, all of whom offer more or less the very same thing. Like corn farmers, for example. If you have a lot of competitors all of whom offer the very same product or service as you do, then you are working in an industry that has been commoditized. Corn is a commodity. So are classified ads.

I have two pieces of content from members of the AFP website (members of the AFP community...) that I'm working on adjusting for print. This process is going to need to be streamlined a lot over the next few weeks, but for now it's great working with people in the community to get information about topics they're interested in ou there.

Three years ago, around this very same time, I sent out my declaration of independence from big media. I thought it was worth a smile, but I was also trying to send a serious message. Amidst the soaring newsprint prices and declining ad revenues, the media corporations have more to worry about.

One of the threads on Poynter's Online-News mailing list over the last week or so was Frequency: Our Toughest Challenge. Greg Harmon of Belden Associates had some good thoughts I want to share here (with permission.)

Greg Harmon wrote: