At The Kelsey Group's Interactive Local Marketing 2006 conference today in Philadelphia, an interesting debate started during a presentation on AOL Local.The central question: What is local?

A rankings-based news aggregator called NewsTrust, which launched Tuesday, is "developing an online news rating service to help people identify quality journalism." A group of reviewers (including students and journalists) rate submitted stories for balance, fairness and originality. The ratings will be featured in a news feed for members. (See the NewsTrust 'about' section for more on how it works.)Fabrice Florin, founder of NewsTrust, is a former journalist and programmer. In an interview with The Editors Weblog, Florin said he hopes the Web site will ultimately reduce inaccuracies in news stories....

Steve Outing posted a column Monday on Poynter.org grading newspaper Web sites  on their use of video, blogs, interactive classified ads and other interactive elements. Outing’s conclusions were solely optimistic or pessimistic, and for newspapers' Web site progress, he gives a B-. The newspaper industry doesn't deserve an "A for effort" in digital media, but B- seems a bit harsh.

Put this article from The New York Times on your worthwhile reading list: With a creative mock job ad, The New York Times delves into what digital media companies are looking for (and already have) in some of their leaders. Several companies – AOL, Gannett, NewsCorp, etc. – have had leadership changes in the past year. The article goes into the “three baskets of digital media overseers” in the market now, and tries to find out why “an archetypal digital media genius” hasn’t surfaced.

Ever since the iPod debuted in 2001, rumors of a mobile phone from Apple have swirled around the blogosphere. Those rumors are gaining momentum with the holidays approaching (just like in years past).

According to C|Net, “Most of the reports have scant evidence and are being written by outlets with dubious track records when it comes to predicting what Steve Jobs & Co. are up to.” But an interesting Crave blog post doesn’t deal with the rumors nearly as much as it focuses on the potential for innovative applications that could come from the invention… that is, if Apple’s actually inventing it.

Anyone care to chime in with their personal mobile phone/device wish list?  (I have a Treo, and my votes is for faster Web surfing, a track-ball mouse and voice recognition capabilities for when I need to add to that never-ending to-do list while driving.)

The Digital Edge Blog will be taking a Thanksgiving break Thursday through Sunday. Here are a few recently published articles worth taking a look at over the long weekend.

-          Charles Lewis on the Future of Investigative Journalism on the Web (NewAssignment.net): Center for Public Integrity Founder Charles Lewis talks to NewAssignment.net’s John McQuiad about when newspapers will stop publishing  on paper, developing future news audiences and why this is a difficult time for investigative journalism.

-          The Kid With All the News About the TV News (NYTimes.com): The blogger behind TVNewser.com turns out to be “Brian Stelter, a baby-faced 21-year-old at Towson University,” The New York Times reports.

-          The Legal Dos and Do Nots of Networked Journalism (NewAssignment.net): The California Supreme Court found a Web site cannot be sued for libelous comments posted to the site (read the Associated Press story), but in October, another blogger lost a libel suit for his posts. Where does that leave legal protection for collaborative journalism projects? NewAssignment.net provides a crash-course in first amendment law for Web 2.0 journalism.

-          About That Digital Divide (UseIt.com): Jakob Nielsen writes about the three stages of the digital divide – economic, usability and empowerment – and notes his optimism for the first two areas and pessimism about the last. “The economic divide is a non-issue, but the usability and empowerment divides alienate huge population groups who miss out on the Internet's potential,” Nielsen summarizes. In a related post, Steve Yelvington argues journalists should get rid of the “moldy old” digital divide question entirely. “Some 60 million U.S. households have Internet access. Daily newspapers reach only about 50 million households. Should we be talking about the print partition? The crushed-tree chasm?” he writes.

Tuesday’s Poynter Centerpiece asked a good question about the content, technology and advertising agreement between Yahoo and six major newspaper companies: “Big Deal or No Big Deal?” Initial signs point to “big deal”. The companies involved in the agreement (MediaNews, Belo, Hearst, Scripps, Journal Register, Lee and Cox) represent 176 newspapers – clearly not a small number of publications. And any announcement from an Internet giant involving newspapers gets plenty of media attention.

The number of citizen, non-corporate and grassroots journalism Web sites that have lasted more than one year is growing (see next post). The number of those powered by former newspaper journalists is increasing, too. Add the New Haven Independent to that list.

About a year ago, Tom Grubisich took a critical look at 10 community journalism Web sites (see the first article). This week in a new Online Journalism Review article (“’Potemkin Village’ Redux”) Grubisich took a look back at the same Web sites and asked, “Was grassroots journalism finally living up to its golden-keyboarded billing?” Featured sites include iBrattleboro, Greensboro 101 and others.

Danah Boyd, who is studying social networks at UC Berkeley, has launched a wiki dedicated to tracing the history of social network sites. And PBS MediaShift blogger Mark Glaser is wondering if bloggers will lose credibility and traffic due to fuzzy conflict of interest rules.

Bloggers wasted no time slamming Peter Scheer's suggestion that newspapers embargo news from their own Web sites to drive print readership.   Scheer, executive director of the California First Amendment Coalition, wrote in an op-ed in the San Francisco Chronicle Monday, "Newspapers and wire services need to figure out a way, without running afoul of antitrust laws, to agree to embargo their news content from the free Internet for a brief period — say, 24 hours — after it is made available to paying customers."

Technorati Founder David Sifry told MarketWatch the increasing number of blog hosting services that split advertising revenue with bloggers means that thousands of bloggers are making money. From ReviewMe to Lisensa to Yepic, the opportunities for bloggers to make some quick cash are growing.