Although MinnPost originally launched with a seed grant from the Knight Foundation, the site currently relies largely on reader contributions for funding, roughly mirroring the NPR model of encouraging readers to become members at various levels, with most contributing $50-$249. Kramer has admitted in interviews, however, that the long-term viability of the reader-member model is untested, and the paper estimates it will need as many as 5,000 paid members by 2012 in order to remain solvent (as opposed to the roughly 1,250 who have signed up to date). Advertising accounts for some of the site’s revenue, but currently the only advertising on the site is served through Google Adsense.

Billing itself as “A Thoughtful Approach to News,” the site has a stated “NO Britney. NO Paris. NO Lindsay policy. Unlike other online similar online newspapers, however, the site offers coverage not only of local Minneapolis-St. Paul news, but also state and national news.

The MinnPost site uses a typical news site layout, with top-mounted nav bar and modules dedicated to various topics and site features. Videos are clearly identified (under the MinnClips section), and comments are enabled on stories, though visitors are required to register in order to comment. There is no ‘breadcrumb trail’ for navigation, but overall the site is user-friendly. MinnPost has also made an effort to engage readers through Twitter, and all stories include a prominent banner encouraging visitors to ‘follow’ the paper.

The overall design seems template-based (the Statesman is owned by Cox), but they have managed to cram quite a bit onto the homepage while keeping a clean, organized look and feel. A horizontal nav bar across the top is complemented by tabs that offer access to Classifieds, Cars, Jobs, Homes and Shopping, and a separate tab at the left offers access to the Statesman’s sister site, Austin 360, which hosts the paper’s entertainment section under a separate masthead.

The site makes considerable use not only of audio and video, which is well-labeled and prominently featured, but also of ‘Interactives,’ which include interactive maps and online quizzes.

One of the things that sets the Statesman apart the most is its embrace of Twitter. Individual articles and blogs on the site include prominent calls to follow the authors on Twitter, and the homepage offers visitors a Twitter directory. In a word, brilliant.

Of course, all of this interactivity is dependent on a motivated, engaged online readership, and the city Austin seems to deliver just that, with among the highest percentage of Internet users in the United States.

While the site makes bold claims of independence, a distinct lack of information about who, precisely, funds the operation, despite the fact that they seem to have quite a bit of money at their disposal, makes their actual agenda difficult to pinpoint. Editorials receive prime placement above the fold on the homepage, but without any clear labeling identifying them as such.

The site’s appearance is professional throughout, with a clean, well-organized design and horizontal nav bar. Photos are plentiful – the homepage features a photo gallery showcasing top stories – but other multimedia seems to be absent. Direct comments are not allowed, and readers wishing to leave feedback must do so by e-mail.

The total readership is hard to estimate, but Web traffic estimates from Quantcast indicate nearly 100,000 monthly visitors to the Chinese-language site and about half as many to the English-language version.

Although the site follows the now-standard modular layout, the various modules are not well separated, and prime placement from the top down is generally given to ads rather than stories. Interactive features like “SeeClickFix” are buried below the fold, and the designers seem to have taken the fashion for white space a bit too far, giving the Register the dubious distinction of having a site that manages to appear both crowded and barren at the same time.

What the site lacks in design it does not, unfortunately, make up for in content. Many of the articles are culled from the AP wire, and even most of the multimedia is not unique to the site. The JRC seems to be staking their online future on the “e-paper” version ($12 per month with a 14-day trial), which promises readers an exact replica of the print edition – “same ads, same classifieds, same sections.” Now there’s vision.

For writers who feel constrained by column-inch requirements in print media, blogging can be a welcome release, allowing posts as short or as long as the subject matter calls for, and the ability to deliver content in the form of videos or sound slides in addition to the usual text and photos.

Blogging, however, also has its pitfalls. Once started, a blog requires regular updates, and many initially committed bloggers end up quitting in frustration – of the 133 million blogs in Technorati’s 2008 State of the Blogosphere, only 7.4 million had been updated in the past four months. A blog, by definition, is never finished, and the mandate for constant revision and interaction that some find exhilerating, others simply find oppressive.

Just what distinguishes ‘hyperlocal’ journalism is, like the site, a work in progress. But for the 11 cities EveryBlock has tackled so far, the experiment seems to be working (even the New York Times is seeking a piece of the action, partnering with EveryBlock to power its local politics engine, “Represent.”

By tapping and parsing the content of local newspapers, blogs, online public records, local review sites like Yelp and social media sharing sites like Flickr, EveryBlock achieves a flavor of journalism that is simultaneously frivolous and profound (Want to know the latest crime statistics and real estate transactions for your area? It’s there. Want to know what people think of the new coffee shop down the block? That’s there, too). Well-established news sites wit a capital ‘N’ mingle nonchalantly with casual snapshots, blog posts and the latest liquor license applications

If, as Tip O’Neill said, all politics is local, the proliferation of geo-tagged multimedia (soon, most if not all still and video cameras will have GPS capability) and social sharing sites is ensuring that an increasing amount of news is local, as well. With vast amounts of news data being posted on the Web on a daily basis, the job of sifting it is becoming a chore, even to algorithms as efficient as Google’s, and tagging by GPS or ZIP code is emerging as one way of making sense of it all.

Though the data on EveryBlock comes from a diverse range of sources, it is generally well organized, though by the nature of the site editorial control is thin, so reliability is not as assured as it might be on a traditional news Web site. Overall, however, the site comes across as professional and user-friendly, and while the site’s architecture is quite different from the average, drilling down from city to street corner and back again is made easy even for the first-time user.

The site’s audience is currently limited by the cities it covers – like Craigslist, EveryBlock has started with the major cities and is working outward from there – though Alexa does indicate some international traffic, as well. Overall traffic growth has been impressive, with Quantcast estimating 1.8 million viewers per month.

At this point, the site does not allow users to interact, but interactive features may well emerge soon, particularly after EveryBlock’s grant funding period with the Knight Foundation expires in June, at which time the source code will be released (and very likely an API, as well, and with it mashup apps).

Despite the site’s vision of hyperlocal news, however, even its founders do not see EveryBlock as the new paradigm of news, just as one new, useful tool for finding and relating to it. “It would be a pity,” they write, “if people used us as their only news source.”

Based in Seattle, Wash., Crosscut took the unusual path of beginning as a for-profit company (2007) and later becoming a nonprofit. The result is a professional-looking blog that in many ways takes its cue more from traditional news Web site design than do similar sites like Voice of San Diego and the Independent, with a stacked-div, modular design. The navigation is user-friendly, with a horizontal nav bar, though the home page content, as with many other similarly-designed news sites, stretches well below the fold. For navigation between stories, users must rely on the browser’s ‘back button,’ and might get drawn away from the home page by repeatedly clicking on ‘related stories’ links. However, the nav bar remains at the top no matter how far the visitor drills down.

Crosscut differs from most of the other online newspapers in having no full-time staff writers, instead relying on freelancers paid between $25 and $300 per story, and unlike the vast majority of new sites it accepts unsolicited story submissions (as well as video, photos, and “just about anything that is non-fiction” from members of the public, though they are not automatically published as on CNN’s iReport site. The site also sets itself apart from most other news sites (though not from the typical blog) by linking to stories appearing on mainstream news Web sites from its home page, something most other sites have avoided, mainly out of fear of the legal threats leveled against aggregator sites like Google News.

Given its significant number of regular and occasional contributing writers, the site is updated frequently, and runs a higher volume of stories than many similar-sized online newspapers and news blogs, though the editors state their goal as publishing “thoughtful and fresh analysis of the important issues of the day, not routine breaking news.” Its audience is primarily Seattle, though it does seek readers from around the Pacific Northwest region and prides itself on being “multi-partisan.”

Overall, the site is more interactive than most of its online newspaper competitors (and even many traditional blogs, many of which still do not accept guest posts) and allows user interaction both through story and multimedia submissions and through comments. Multimedia, however, seems lacking (no video was directly available from the home page at the time of review). Advertising, meanwhile, is considerably more prominent, with Google Adsense links and banners alongside paid-placement ad banners and a prominent call for PayPal donations.