I came across a new term yesterday: hyper-local news. There is a news site called YourStreet that will automatically detect (or at least attempt to do so … it got my location correct withing 50 miles or so) your geographical region and show you local news stories pinpointed on a map. You can also select areas by zip code or city name, etc.. It was pretty cool to see that a man was arrested for impersonating a police officer at a gas station downtown 2 days ago.
According to an informational article that talked about the site, the way it gathers news is from parsing tens of thousands of rss feeds, so there’s nobody sitting in a room somewhere adding stories – it’s all automated.