The scent of freshly made waffle cones hangs heavy in the clear night air.

From the NYT:

In a seller’s ideal world, the product is paid for first, then manufactured and shipped. The sellers of television on DVD are trying to create that world: ABC Television, Amazon.com and a subsidiary, CustomFlix Labs, a DVD manufacturer, announced Thursday that they were going to make shows from the archives of ABC News available on demand.

So when a history buff wants to buy a DVD about the assassination of President John F. Kennedy or the wedding of Prince Charles and Lady Diana, they will order it on Amazon.com or ABC.com, pay for it, then wait two or three days for delivery. The DVD will be copied from digital files stored at CustomFlix only when the order has been placed, and the seller incurs none of the costs of inventory and warehousing.

The market potential for on-demand DVD sales is considerable. For Amazon alone, projected sales of DVDs should be just under 5 percent of its $7.6 billion domestic sales revenue in 2007, said Aaron Kessler, a senior research analyst at Piper Jaffray. On-demand doesn’t make sense for books, he said, but it does for infrequent orders on DVD or CD.

From the NYT:

The Washington Post, well known for its detailed coverage of the White House and global affairs, will introduce a Web site today with news and other information for a rarefied group: people who live in Loudoun County, Va., population 272,000.

The site, LoudounExtra.com, is an experiment in hyperlocal news; it will have church schedules, restaurant menus and real-time high school football scores. The county, in northern Virginia, includes Dulles International Airport and the town of Leesburg.

“There will be stories about things that normally would not make it into the pages of The Washington Post, like mailboxes being knocked down,” said Rob Curley, vice president of product development for Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive. “It has every Rotary meeting, every Bible study group. It is very local.”

Quick question: Is there money be made in delivering church schedules online in the Facebook era? If I'm a member of Church A, do I really care about what Churches B or C are routinely up to?

If Loudon County has 272,000 people, why would a mailbox being knocked down in the far part of the northeast quadrant be of interest to people in the far part of the southeast quadrant?

Is the assumption in hyperlocal journalism that just because it happened locally, it's interesting even if it's routine? I always had the apparently now-obsolescent belief that news was about the exceptional.

Addendum

Publishing 2.0's Scott Karp says that LoudonExtra isn't hyperlocal enough.

A foil packet of ketchup, having surreptitiously fallen to the floor and inadvertently stepped on, can blast blobs of the red stuff more than six metres when it ruptures.

Feel free to test the veracity of that statement, but I would suggest using someone else's home to do so.

Thing young Americans are blowing off just newspapers? Think again. While newspapers are perhaps taking the worst beating, those under 30 don't have the same news habit as their predecessors.

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