Yahoo News has launched local pages for metropolitan areas across the United States, aggregating local news from RSS feeds and via screen-scraping. Users of Yahoo's personalization tools will get a link that aggregates their hometown news by default, and a cluster of local headlines on the news.yahoo.com page.

The typical local page uses RSS feeds to pull in headlines and summaries from half a dozen sites, each linking back to the site (through a clickthrough counter) for story views. For each participating website, there's also a a site-specific RSS aggregation page on Yahoo.

All of this is separate from the personalized my.yahoo.com page, which is conceptually more of a Web-based RSS reader than a news portal system.

Sites with tight registration requirements or restrictive RSS usage policies are being left off the bus. This means that in some metro areas, the major local newspaper may be missing.

Yahoo has been negotiating registration changes for some major sites in order to include them, asking that Yahoo visitors be allowed to click through without having to register on the destination sites.

Threat or opportunity?

Probably not much of either. MSNBC has been doing local pages for years, working directly with local TV stations and newspapers long before RSS became a factor. It didn't seem to have a tremendous effect one way or the other. Yahoo's effort may be somewhat stronger, as it includes more sources, but I don't see it as radically different.

All of this is part of an inevitable pattern. The Internet makes it possible to disintegrate content and to reintegrate it in new ways. Screen-scrapers, RSS feeds, search engines, feed readers, and socially driven link aggregators (Slashdot, Digg) aren't going away.

My advice to local news sites: Get your own house in order.

Users will choose and use multiple jumping-off points. The choice will be driven by quality of experience.

If your homepage is ugly, cluttered and overloaded with hucksterism, you shouldn't be surprised if many users flee to the sterile organization of Yahoo Local. If your site offers poor opportunities for interaction, then you shouldn't be surprised if many users migrate to Topix or one of the many local discussion sites that are popping up all over the country. If you don't engage with local bloggers and photographers, don't be surprised to find a version of Greensboro101 in your own backyard, or a big locally focused Flickr pool.

Do a great job. Earn your way. Make your users fall in love with your site.

It's a provocative introduction to the "State of the Media 2006" report from the Project for Excellence in Journalism: "Will we recall this as the year when journalism in print began to die?"

It's not that bad, the report says: "We believe some fears are overheated. For now, the evidence does not support the notion that newspapers have begun a sudden death spiral. The circulation declines and job cuts will probably tally at only about 3% for the year. The industry still posted profit margins of 20%."

But beneath the surface the report finds trouble:

• More outlets are covering fewer stories with thinner resources.
• Big-city newspapers are suffering disproportionate circulation losses.
• "The decades-long battle at the top between idealists and accountants is now over" and the idealists have lost.
• "The central economic question in journalism continues to be how long it will take online journalism to become a major economic engine, and if it will ever be as big as print or television."

The report also says "Online journalism, in 2006, is still young. Like an adolescent, it is learning what it can do. It is even making a little money. But it is still not really paying its own way. And it isn’t entirely sure what it will be doing when it grows up."

Update: Terry Heaton says the overall theme of the report "is defensive and whiny and doesn't do the industry any good." He says professional journalism itself is the problem: "Professional journalism -- as this report (and the institution itself) defines it -- is sinking slowly into the sea of irrelevance, having been blasted by the torpedoes of a culture that wishes to move forward."

If you're one of the dozen or so who don't already have Jeff Jarvis' blog in a newsreader and check it daily, you should follow the link and read his rip on NJ state legislator Peter Biondi's really dumb bill that would outlaw anonymity in online conversation -- and make forum operators liable for any anonymous defamation.

In 1960, Justice Hugo Black gave us all a much-needed history lesson in Talley v. California:

"Anonymous pamphlets, leaflets, brochures and even books have played an important role in the progress of mankind. Persecuted groups and sects from time to time throughout history have been able to criticize oppressive practices and laws either anonymously or not at all. The obnoxious press licensing law of England, which was also enforced on the Colonies was due in part to the knowledge that exposure of the names of printers, writers and distributors would lessen the circulation of literature critical of the government. The old seditious libel cases in England show the lengths to which government had to go to find out who was responsible for books that were obnoxious to the rulers. John Lilburne was whipped, pilloried and fined for refusing to answer questions designed to get evidence to convict him or someone else for the secret distribution of booksin England. Two Puritan Ministers, John Penry and John Udal, were sentenced to death on charges that they were responsible for writing, printing or publishing books. Before the Revolutionary War colonial patriots frequently had to conceal their authorship or distribution of literature that easily could have brought down on them prosecutions by English-controlled courts. Along about that time the Letters of Junius were written and the identity of their author is unknown to this day. Even the Federalist Papers, written in favor of the adoption of our Constitution, were published under fictitious names. It is plain that anonymity has sometimes been assumed for the most constructive purposes."

Pressthink's Blue Plate Special launched today with a list headlined "The Best Blogging Newspapers
in the U.S.*" with a quick explanation (signaled by the asterisk) that it's not really the best blogging newspapers in the United States. Instead, Jay Rosen's students at New York University surveyed the 100 largest-circulation daily newspapers in the United States to see what they're doing.

The list is useful, but much of the real innovation is happening outside that list of 100 big newspapers.

I'm also reminded of a John Stewart report on blog coverage by big media, in which he gushed about how they're using the revolutionary technology of the Internet to give voice to the ... already voiced. Much of what shows up on the list is blogging from the staff to the audience, and some of the sites have little or no activity in response. Sometimes absence of signal is a signal.