WapReview

Patch is a "hyper-local" US news site that delivers professionally written and edited news, photos and videos for nearly 500 small  US cities, towns and neighborhoods 

Each locality has it's own site on a sub-domain URL, i.e., halfmoonbay.patch.com. The ad-supported sites are full-featured local news sources. updated frequently with the latest local news, sports, weather,  photos, videos and event listings. There are also columns, classified ads, letters to the editor,  a directory of local shops and services.

Patch, a startup that was aquired by AOL in 2009 for $7 million.,targets mostly upper-middle class communities with a population between 15 and 100 thousand that are underserved by traditional journalism..  Each community site typically has one paid local editor/writer who creates most of the content and also buys stories from free lancers.

AOL is bullish about Patch's potential and is sinking $50 million into it in 2010. It will hire 500 full time editors in 2010 making the largest hirer of journalists for the year AOL hopes to make money on Patch with local advertising  and has created an automated system that lets advertisers create their own ads complete with coupons and discount offers.

The mobile edition of Patch is served to detected mobile browsers.  Theire is no separate mobile URL. It includes the full text, with photos and video of recent news articles plus the events listings and local business directory and a news archive search.

Examiner.com is a network of over 100 local news blogs for U.S. cities started by Philip Anschutz, who also owns several print newspapers.  Stories on Examiner.com are written by non-professional local citizen journalists who are paid based on the number of page views their articles receive. The low quality of many Examiner.com posts led to it being considered a content farm by some professional journalists and by Google. Examiner.com claims it's improving.

The Examiner.com's content includes  local and national news, sports, weather, the arts, technology, event listings and restaurant reviews.

A new mobile site brings together local news pages covering about 50 cites in 42 states. The individual sites combine news from local television stations, weather including radar images from the Weather Channel, local movie listings, national sports and stock quotes. Content varies by city with around 50 cities having local news, weather, sports, stocks and movie listings. Another 50 or so cities have "placeholder" sites with no local news or movie listings - just weather, stocks and sports.

The service is the product of LSN Inc. which produces sales and marketing programs for broadcast television stations. They seem to promoting the service as a way for local stations to add a branded mobile site at a relatively low cost.

The site's title, Local TV News implies video to me but so far at at least the site is all text. I think LSN plans on adding streaming news videos eventually. Some of the news stories have links to Video On Demand: Build Your Own Newscast however these links all seem to return a 404 not found error.

The site uses browser detection to deliver wml to wap1 phones or xhtml to those devices that can handle it. The wml and xhtml pages are identical - same text and small gif logos - it would be nice if the extra capabilities of wap2 were exploited to add a bit of color to this very vanilla looking site. The browser detection seem to generally work well, although xhtml was served to my wml only Openwave 4.1 emulator. Seeing as the emulator is not a real device, I can live with that but I think that sites using browser detection should provide alternate urls to force wml or html/xhtml content when browser detection fails.

Although US television news has a mostly deserved reputation for shallow and sensationalist coverage, local news is the prime area in which local stations compete for ratings. Local TV news does tend to focus on sensational crime stories but many of these stations also do real investigative reporting particularly in the consumer area. One can't complain about the quantity of news either at least based on the San Francisco site which has 15 stories averaging 12 screenfulls of text on a typical phone (about 10 column inches in newspaper terms). The stories are not stale, they reflect current TV news coverage.