Innovation

“Where we’ve found inspiration is Internet retail, not publishing,” he told me last week. “We’re becoming a direct Internet retailer and we have to have expertise to do that. When you do that with publishing, it looks like a different business.”

The conventional wisdom (to borrow an old phrase iconized by Newsweek): weekly reading bio-rhythms are dead; it’s a 24-/7 news world and let’s get on with it. One problem: the human brain.

Why couldn’t newspaper companies do what Patch announced — a nationwide network of hyperlocal sites?

“It’s the legacy crap,” one veteran with feet in both camps told me. “Instead of burning it down and starting all over, they just experiment.”

Young Otis Chandler — generation six of the family that built the Times into one of America’s great papers — talked about his four-year Goodreads, a social book review site that has grown to 1.7 million unique visitors a month, a 65% jump from a year ago. So if young Otis has modernized the book section, what other traditional newspaper section are ripe for digital modernization?

So who’s the ad competition? Maybe we should ask, who isn’t? …The question, here, is one of sustainability. Certainly, there’s the question whether Patch can sustain itself, as its parent AOL struggles to find a new identity and growing business model. Then, there’s the question of the sustainability of hyperlocal journalism already being done from coast to coast. These are true start-ups, often one-man (or -woman) bands, invented by journalists truly passionate about community coverage. Pre-Patch, it’s been the fledgling blog ad-and-distribution network experiments that gave hope that more money could be found to support these ventures. Now, we have to wonder whether Patch — which will link to other sites it finds useful, but won’t network them — will make the sustainability of these more organic, non-templated local blogs more questionable.

Google and Verizon, of all companies, know that it is the mobile web that’s the big prize going forward. Choose your favorite metaphor. The Internet will be like water, like electricity, like air. For the next generation, it will just be there, accessible from anywhere at the touch of some device, or maybe just the turn of the head. The tethered, desktop web is already becoming your father’s Internet.

23. That’s the number of companies Google has bought since January, 2009

So we go from macro (“10 Reasons to Watch the TBD Launch,” to micro, as we all get look at the site, and can translate the good theory behind the site to its actual look, feel and execution.

The launch will come next week, in the doggiest days of D.C. summer, creating a regional DC alternative to the long-impressive WashingtonPost.com. I’ll offer today a half-dozen reasons why TBD is a launch worth watching by all those in Old and Newer media. It may be the first significant launch of the year.

Think what a program to get a modest tithing, a pledging of new philanthropic dollars to assure the free flow of news and information, as that next generation of news creation is born.

Using a $300 billion number, take one measly percent, and you get $3 billion. That would do the trick