Here is a recap of posts from last week, in case you missed any. Click below to read each post in full.

NPR Gets $3 Million for Local Initiative

NPR will work with a pilot group of a dozen NPR stations to create multimedia local news that will work online and on radio, thanks to new grants from the Corporation of Public Broadcasting ($2 million) and $1 million from the Knight Foundation. (read more…)

Yellow Pages and SMB Odds and Ends

For a bit of insight on how small businesses in a meat and potatoes category (Tire Dealers) view the evolution of their ad spend, see this article from TireBusiness.com (I only get it for the articles). One observation is how little performance measurement enters into the discussion of where to invest ad dollars. (read more…)

Pay-Per-Call Transparency: A Conversation With Yext

I’m slowly getting around to catching up with all of the local search companies that received accolades at the TechCrunch50 show earlier this month. Rounding out the list is Yext, a company that characterizes itself as a “pay per action” provider. (read more…)

Aloqa Launches API, Lowers Barriers for Mobile Publishers

In our last writeup on Aloqa, one of the features highlighted was the ability for businesses to create a branded “channel” within the Aloqa app. The benefit here is that it’s much cheaper than building your own iPhone app and could even get found easier, given the increasing amount of noise (85,000 apps) in Apple’s App Store. (read more…)

Dinan: PPC Will Dominate but Coexist With Subscription Pricing

Caught up with Bill Dinan after our Directional Media Strategies event last week, where he sat on a panel that I moderated called “Fixing the Yellow Pages Business Model.” Much of the session content centered around pay-per-call models. (read more…)

San Diego Hyperlocal Site Launches ‘U.S. Local News Network’

The San Diego News Network announced ambitious plans to expand its template for local news, sports, events, lifestyle and entertainment, to 40 North American cities in the next 30 months. The company, renamed  The U.S. Local News Network, already has sites in San Diego and the southwest portion of adjacent Riverside County. It is set to launch in Orange County before the end of the year. The company has raised close to $2 million. (read more…)

Facebook’s Tim Kendall: What Works in Social Advertising

Facebook is tweaking its approach to advertising, given the realities of what’s effective in social media, according to Facebook Director of Monetization Tim Kendall, who was speaking at TargusInfo’s Online Lead Quality Summit last week in Las Vegas. The problem is people who are visiting social networks are not explicitly in “consideration mode,” he noted. (read more…)

Can Pandora Be a Local Play?

I missed this until now but Sarah Lacy at TechCrunch has an interesting post on Internet radio business models. This is told through the story of Pandora, which had a few brushes with fatality, since being alleviated by grassroots action, funding and a favorable RIAA settlement. (read more…)

Bookshelf: Stibel’s ‘Wired for Thought’

There has been kind of a disconnect for me in former Web.com head Jeff Stibel’s twin identities as a top local executive, and as a brain scientist. Not anymore. In a provocative and valuable new book, “Wired for Thought,” Stibel lays out a solid case that the development of the Internet parallels the development of the human brain — only the Internet doesn’t suffer from poor memory and slow processing speeds. (read more…)

One Newspaper’s Revenue Strategy: Hard-Core Focus on Local, Print

Newspapers can still win with a hardcore community focus in their journalism and advertising, and a renewed emphasis on print. Or at least, that’s s the message delivered by Ed Moss, the newly installed publisher of The San Diego Union-Tribune, which was sold a few months ago at a fire-sale price to Platinum Equity, a buyer of troubled properties. (read more…)