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."

 
 
One of the more challenging issues for journalism is to report on itself. In the case of media owned by diversified corporations, that poses an even larger challenge.

The Washington Post noted this week that the top-rated NBC Nightly News with Brian Williams was one of the few major media organizations not to report that General Electric had not paid any corporate taxes this year. GE is NBC's parent company.

NBC indicated this was not a conscious decision to avoid news about its owners, but simply a matter of an editorial selection process that happened not to focus on the story.

The Post drew on the Fairness and Accuracy in Media organization to argue that several GE-related stories have been underplayed by NBC over the years and that tax-avoidance stories had made the newscast when others were involved.
 

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