Media stories for Friday:

Reuters reports the European Publishers Council, mindful of Google's settlement last week with France, is arguing that the company must extend its offer to pay media for its content across the continent.  It asserts that Google makes its money from the free access to published content. While Google has never agreed to pay for links, it has settled in France and Belgium with funds to support media.

AOL released quarterly financials today that indicate revenue growth, but there was precious little about the performance of its hyperlocal Patch operation. Bernard Lunn, the digital media and software entrepreneur, has an extensive post on the importance of the Patch experiment for those who wonder about the business model of local journalism in the digital age. He believes the successes in local content will be the authentically committed, not those with the hot money.

The day after the announced closure of EveryBlock, a ground-breaking but ultimately unsuccessful venture in local content, Knight-Mozilla Open Project leader Dan Sinker writes of its impact. While EveryBlock failed to catch on for a variety of reasons, Sinker says there are countless versions of what it originally coded now on display as integral in our way of approaching local information. "EveryBlock is one of those ideas that bent the world in a new way when it came around," he writes. 

Some media notes for Thursday:

The pioneering hyperlocal site, EveryBlock, has closed. At one stage it set a standard for converting local data into web content --- for instance, mapping criminal incidents in a district --- but did not find a business model as others crowded into its space. NBC, which bought EveryBlock when its initial grant funds ran their course, announced the closure today.

Copy editors have been hardest hit by cuts in newsrooms, suggests a report from the King's Journalism Review at the University of King's College in Halifax. The report from Natascia Lypny raises the notion that standards are being affected as editors are dwindling. Poynter's Jeff Sonderman augmented her report with data of his own that suggests an even larger decline.

Tom Rosenstiel, the respected veteran news executive now running the American Press Institute, launched his column today at Poynter and it plans to explore the intersection of journalism and building community. "Journalism has always been a service connecting people to one another, to government, to goods and services, to social institutions and more — in other words, the creation of communities," he writes. "Looked at that way, technology is no threat to journalism’s future. It is its opportunity. It is a new dazzling set of tools. It is, as it has always been, the next journalism."

The announcement today that Adrian Holovaty's Everyblock organization has been purchased by MSNBC.com has prompted Alan Mutter to post on Reflections of a Newsosaur a lament.

In short, it's along the lines of: How did publishers miss the opportunity to buy it instead? And, by extension: How do they not realize MSNBC is going to come and try to eat their lunch?

Everyblock is a powerful source code that aggregates local data on crime, construction, civics and consumption, everything from restaurants to break and enters, and yields the data according to zip codes and blocks.

The good news is that the source code is open for others to use. The catch is that whatever you create you must let others use, too.

Mutter suggests Everyblock has the potential as a Cragislist-like competitor for local advertising. He wonder why newspapers didn't see this coming and construct the deal themselves.