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.

If your head is stuck on the notion that the Internet is for young people, take a look at these stats from the Pew Internet and American Life project.

Notice that 30-49 group is only one point behind 18-29.

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%."

About eight years ago, the McClatchy Co. surprised just about everybody by making the top bid for Cowles Media, owner of the Star Tribune in Minneapolis, where I worked. The reaction in the newsroom at the time was: "Who?"

The bidding had been secret. Everybody figured one of the biggies -- the Tribune Company of Chicago, or the Washington Post (which already owned a share of the Star Tribune) would be the victor. But who was this McClatchy outfit?

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.

Mark Glaser, who has moved over to PBS, has some more thoughts on the new AP Video service being unavailable outside the Microsoft world. He quotes some discussion from the online-news email list and has attracted some feedback, much of which gets at that old Microsoft. vs. Apple feud. Here's what I posted in response:

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.