WapReview

News, sports, weather and obituaries from the Demopolis Times, a daily paper published in the small city of Demopolis in west central Alabama.

News, Radar, Weather, Sports and TV program schedule for North Alabama from Hutsvill's WAFF, TV channel 48. Source Oh! Mobile Directory.

Gannett's Montgomery, Alabama newspaper.

The Anchorage Daily News' mobile site. Features lots of local Alaska news as well as national and international news items.

The Arizona Star is published in Tuson

A good local news site from a print newspaper in Phoenix, AZ. Stories are complete and there are many of them. The emphasis is strongly on local Arizona news.

Tucson, AZ Citizen

Baxter Bulletin - Mountain Home, Arkansas

Fayetteville, Fort Smith and Northwest Arkansas News, News, Weather, Sports and Entertainment - from Northwest Arkansas' KHBS Ch 40, Fort Smith and KHOG Ch 29, Rogers. Source: Oh! Mobile Directory

Little Rock, Arkansas TV stations mobile web news site.

The Los Angeles Times has had a mobile site since at least 2003. The latest revision features photos and more a more usable layout. There's plenty of content with excellent Southern California coverage in addition to National and International News and articles from the paper's news, sports, entertainment, features and editorial sections.

Los Angeles TV station's mobile news site. News, Sports, Entertainment, Money, Technology, Family, Health and Travel sections. lots of full length articles.

Text-only mobile news site of KTLA, TV Channel 5 in Los Angeles. Features News, Sports, Entertainment and staffer blogs.  Source: Oh! Mobile Directory

Los Angles area daily paper with extensive local news, weather, sports and business coverage plus letters to the editor and editorials. Source: Oh! Mobile Directory

With local newspapers seemingly unable to make the switch to an online world and dying off like flies, the concept of the "hyper-local" news site has taken off. The genre has a attracted the attention of big media with AOL pouring millions of dollars into building a network of thousands of Patch.com hyper-local sites and MSNBC acquiring everyblock.com, a smaller (16 sites) hyper-local network.

Founded in 2010, Oakland Local (OL) is different. Published  by a community based, non-profit organization, it's an online news source for Oakland California, residents. Updated around the clock by an all-volunteer staff of eight, OL is credited with breaking the story of Iraq War veteran, Scott Olsen being critically injured by a police projectile during the repression of the Occupy Oakland demonstations.

OL carries no advertising and has an annual budget of under $60,00 which comes from contributions and grants.

Oakland Local has won several awards including a Society of Professional Journalists' Prize for for multimedia cultural coverage and is included in the Columbia Journalism Review's News Frontier Database of the top online news sources. It also provides training and support for local non-profit and community groups staff and members who want to learn journalism and online publishing and social media skills.

Hosted at WordPress.com, Oakland Local is mobile friendly.

The Desert Sun, Palm Springs, CA daily newspaper.

News, sports, weather, editorials and letters to the editor from Pasadena, California's Star-News daily paper. Source: Tappity

 

Mobile edition of the Redding, CA Record Searchlight features local news, sports, business, entertainment, lifestyle and weather.

KXTV-TV, Channel 10 serving Sacramento, Stockton, and Modesto CA.

The daily newspaper from California's capitol offers this mobile site which has the full content of about 50 stories with an emphasis on local news, politics, sports and business. There are also weather forecasts with radar ands satellite maps and local movie listings.

The Salinas Californian newspaper's mobile site.

Mobile edition of the San Diego Union Tribune daily newspaper.  Content is somewhat limited, consisting of five stories each from the News, Local, Sports, Business and Entertainment sections.  The site is easy to navigate and should be compatible with all mobile browsers.  A couple of nice touches are the today's weather forecast displayed at the top of the home page and a traffic section listing current conditions on major area roads.

IFinally the San Francisco Chronicle has a proper mobile edition. It's at mobile.sfgate.com. SFGate.com also redirects mobile browsers to the mobile version. Fear not full-web browser users, you can still get to the full version, if you want. Just click the link at the bottom of the mobile page labeled "Standard". This is something that every site that redirects from their main URL to a mobile variant should be doing. but which most are not. Not every mobile user wants the mobile editon, especially if it's a subset.

Mobile.SFGate.com is a subset but a pretty good one. Today it includes the full text of 18 top news stories and between 5 and 31 items each in the Weird News, Local, Sports, Entertainment, Food & Wine, Business and Technology, Gossip, Home & Garden and Travel sections. Fourteen of the paper's columnists and the same number of its blogs are in today's mobile edition. I didn't see Willie Brown's column but it's only published on Sunday. Maybe Willie will appear on his publication date. There are Classified ads but they are strangely limited to just Autos and Real Estate. This seems like a missed bet , where are popular categories like garage sales (a must for mobile), pets and Jobs? Content is rounded out with horoscopes and an Op-Ed page. There are no photos though. I think that news sites really need to include some news photos. Of course they need to limited in size and weight to what the browser can handle. Speaking of which, the only image on the site is the paper's logo which at 215px wide is too wide for many phone browsers.

SFGate now offers text alerts for breaking news too. You can sign up at sfgate.com/mobile.

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San Francisco's local Fox network TV affiliate KTVU Channel 2, home of the most popular TV news broadcast in the San Francisco market, has launched a mobile news site.

 

Mobile KTVU.COM is notable in a couple of areas. The site uses browser detection to adapt output to the capabilities of different browsers. Image size varies from from 96 to 236 px wide to fit the screen width on most devices. The site delivers wml and .gif images to browsers that can't handle xhtml-mp or .jpgs. The other area where KTVU stands out especially among mobile local news sites it's extensive use of images. Virtually ever page has a picture. There are also several weather radars - although the most important one - the local short range one wasn't current when I checked it, showing clear conditions as heavy rain fell. Unlike other local news sites which generally use a service like mDog or Crisp to create a mobile site from RSS feeds, KTVU's seems to have been custom programmed for the station.

Of course the content of site is local TV news copy. KTVU does some good investigative reporting. Local news has a strong emphasis on crime reporting, typical of local news coverage. There is also ample coverage of local sports, an entertainment news section and local traffic incident reports from sigalert.com.

Mobile edition of the San Gabriel Valley Tribune, a daily paper based in the greater Los Angeles area. The site includes local news, sports, weather, opinions, letters to the editor and photos. The San Gabriel Valley is west of LA. It's largest cities are  West Covina and Pasadena. Source: Oh! Mobile Directory

Mobile web edition of the Northern Califiornia college town and surf mecca's daily paper. The well designed site has over a hundred current, unabridged items in news, sports, business, editorials and letters sections. Most are illustrated with a news photo. I like that today's weather forecast appears at the top of the home page. It's possibe to register for an account allowing you to customize whch sections of the site you see by default. Registration requires an SMS activation code however, which seems unecessary and overly intrusive.

Local news, weather, editorials and letters to the editor from the Ukiah California Daily Journal. Source: Oh! Mobile Directory

Combined site  for the Tulare Advance Register and Visalia Times Delta from California's Central Valley. Nicely done mobile local news site with Local News, Photos, Weather and Sports.

Paywall with 7 day free trial for new users.

Latest news, weather, sports, business, editorials, police blotter and letters to the editor from LA suburb Whittier, CA, the boyhood home of Richard Nixon. Source: Oh Mobile Directory

Local news, sports, weather, editorials and obituaries for Northern California lumber town Willits.  Source: Oh! Mobile Directory