The Journal Register Company, based in Yardley, Bucks County and once called among the 10 worst managed companies in the country, announced on July 4th that its 18 daily websites and newspapers were published that weekend using free tools and “crowdsourced journalism.”

“Does this mean that [moving forward] all newsrooms will publish using Scribus or will tone all photos using Gimp? No, but if an operation — part Journal Register or an outside company — wanted to, they could,” the press release read. “The tools we discovered, trained on and used as part of the Ben Franklin Project could allow a news organization to throw away their old methods and start anew.”

Dubbed the Ben Franklin Project, started with conversations in April, the release says, and moved from an experiment to a project aimed at reducing costs and increasing efficiency. The project will move forward to implementing more of those open source strategies more regularly.

Among its 170 print titles, JRC boasts ownership of 18 daily newspapers, including its signature New Haven Register in Connecticut and a smattering of dailies in the Philadelphia suburbs from The Daily Local News of West Chester, The Mercury of Pottstown, the Delaware County Times and the Trentonian of Trenton, N.J. in addition to others.

The project also involves a movement to more open journalism processes, which happened for stories last weekend across JRC properties.

The Delaware County Times, for example, “tackled property taxes and asked residents to bring in their bills so the staff could see what people are paying and what the community is getting back for those payments.”

The official announcement from July 4th reads with a certain zeal one might not expect from a stodgy company’s press release, saying today “marks not only Journal Register Company’s independence from the costly proprietary systems that have long restricted newspapers and news companies alike. Today also marks the start of a revolution. Today marks the beginning of a new path for media companies whose employees are willing to shape their own future.”

Updated: 8/31/09 6:17 p.m., source title

Sarah Lockard should take more walks.

Earlier this summer, the Wayne native was on a long stroll when she decided she should contact Internet craft supply marketplace Etsy about working with AroundMainLine.com, the online magazine startup she launched last fall to cover the famed, ritzy swath of Philadelphia suburbs.

It was on another walk — one amid the crowds of last September spring’s blue-blooded Devon Horse Show — that the former B2B magazine sales executive decided the Main Line needed community coverage online.

Sarah Lockard

Both “epiphanies,” as Lockard called them, seem to have worked out just fine. AroundMainLine.com has partnered with Etsy to profile artisan goods from regional crafts-makers and, while she declined to disclose monthly revenue or funding, her online magazine features weekly content, has a Web designer on staff, photographers on call and a sidebar etched with advertising.

Lockard, 34, boasts that hers was the first for-profit online magazine in the Philadelphia region. But she won’t be the last.

The hyperlocal Web outfit — tied by geography, focused on a niche community and online-only — is meant to be a great wave of the future, seen by MSNBC’s recent purchase of crime and news aggregator EveryBlock, partnerships with online news startups and product launches like Outside.In and Patch.com.

Philadelphia has its first wave of adopters, but their sustainability is far less certain.

Lockard couldn’t name a single site in the Delaware Valley that joined her in independently adding original reporting to a localized coverage area. Though they exist, others, too, knew little of anyone else doing what they did. Most were islands; many part-time bloggers and aggregators and no others with any signs of revenue coming in.

They range from sites focusing on neighborhoods or towns of little more than a few thousand people and motivated by a sense of public service to academic tools funded by big pockets to sites, like Lockard’s, that aim to cover a community better and prove sustainable with a business plan in tow.

Is the future of hyperlocal Philadelphia online news here, or are we still dependent on collapsing community newspapers and a shrinking mainstream media industry, the largest and most influential of whom are fighting to remain solvent?

NEIGHBORHOOD SERVICE

The hyperlocal news movement — often pegged as an outgrowth in 2005 — was going to begin on the most local level: the neighborhoods and towns and regions too small or too underpopulated to be covered profitably by mainstream media, particularly at a time of struggle for legacy print journalism outlets. The hyperlocal trend, the experts said, would be fed largely by citizen journalists, emboldened by plummeting technology costs and the power of social media.

Yet, for a city of neighborhoods, our blocks aren’t heavy with the citizen journalists some might expect. In an age of personal publishing, social media and, now, a flux of unemployed journalists, Technically Philly found just two regularly updated, neighborhood-specific sites.

Jim Smiley is a neighborhood kid. He grew up in Frankford, a historic and beleaguered working class neighborhood in lower Northeast Philadelphia that plunged into urban decay during the last decades of the 20th century. After surprising many by buying a home in the old neighborhood following his graduation from Drexel University and nabbing a Center City Web development gig, Smiley, 31, and his father, now retired but still living in Frankford, founded the Frankford Gazette — or reincarnated the name of an old print community paper and put it to a blog format [Full Disclosure: The author of this article lives in Frankford and has been featured on the Frankford Gazette site.]

Seeing Frankford as destined for a change — big, grand architecture, a 15-minute El ride to Old City, with parks, trees and parking — the Smileys set out to chronicle the good, but balance it with the bad.

The pair runs Google adsense, but with weekly traffic numbered in the hundreds and not much advertising interest in a low-income, inner-city neighborhood, there is little more hope than to recoup some hosting expense. Instead, the blog, updated a few times a week with aggregation, shoe-leather reporting and hounding local legislators, is something of a community service.

It’s a familiar tune for Andrew Schwalm.

Since moving to 51st Street in 2003, Schwalm, 34, has found a deep love for his portion of West Philadelphia. Lured by the interest in writing, exploring and promoting an adjacent park, he began MalcolmXPark.org, which caters to the 52nd Street corridor and other activities in and around the park.

“I have no high-minded journalism intent here… or think I could build a business or make money,” he says. “I love this neighborhood, and so I’m not interested in necessarily reporting in an unbiased way. I’m very much in the mode of a booster.”

But there’s only one problem, a recurrent problem with all citizen journalism projects. He’s leaving.

In the coming weeks, he’s moving with his girlfriend, who took a job at New York University in Manhattan, and he doesn’t know who, if anyone, would take over his role. Whatever readers he found through photos, resident interviews and event listings will likely lose the only source adding value to Malcolm X. Park.

Traffic numbers for Frankford Gazette and MalcolmXPark.org

EXPERIMENTS IN MISSION

There is no doubt that many of the questions that surround the future of hyperlocal news are tied to the historic doubt surrounding much of the news media we have come to know, particularly print standard-bearers like daily newspapers.

So, it may come as no surprise that college schools of communications have seen a gaping hole in local news coverage as an opportunity for training the future of journalism.

In recent years, Temple University has retrofitted its much-trumpeted Multimedia Urban Reporting Lab capstone course, stuffing its Philadelphia Neighborhoods site with student content covering under-served neighborhoods. One of the professors leading MURL doesn’t shy away from calling the course an important part of the next generation of local reporting.

Not to be outdone by its bigger North Philadelphia Big Five rival, LaSalle University is rolling out this semester its own localized news course, run by for-credit student labor. Led by former 18-year Inquirer columnist reporter Huntly Collins, the first class of 14 LaSalle journalism seniors will be working in partnership with G-Town Radio and Germantown Newspapers to add coverage to that aged northwest community, after a month of diversity training.

“You know that saying, ‘all politics is local?’ Well, all reporting is local. If we don’t teach our students to cover local news, they won’t really know how to report on anything, from a different community or someplace like Baghdad,” Collins says. “The future of local news is really the future of news.”

Collins declined an offer to partner her students’ content with Student Union 34, the Comcast-sponsored, Inquirer-backed Web site of college-student journalism classwork, citing an interest in working with more localized content. She says she hopes to make their coverage a dependable addition to the Germantown media, including their Web sites.

Others are looking at that portion of the city and its ability to sustain local, online reporting experimentation.

The Web and civic engagement arm of WHYY, headed by former Inquirer editorial page editor Chris Satullo, is waiting on a large grant from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting to roll out its own hyperlocal news network focusing on Germantown and the rest of northwest Philadelphia [Full Disclosure: The author has expressed interest in a position with this proposed initiative / Brian James Kirk and Sean Blanda were involved in the design of SU34].

Sources also told Technically Philly of other foundations and well-funded individuals who are snooping around the idea of Philadelphia’s local news future. While big money can usher in legitimacy, none of these have any business model, but Lockard and AroundMainLine aren’t alone.

A BUSINESS OF MAKING NEWS

In April, John Myers launched West Philly News, taking on the cumbersome task of covering perhaps the most economically, racially and socially diverse region of the city, mostly through aggregation of print publications like the UC Review and the Daily Pennsylvanian. That work is abutted with occasional citizen journalism, like photos he takes and those submitted by readers.

The South Jersey-native is the founder of NorthernLiberties.org and its active community bulletin, but after leaving that neighborhood to buy a home in Spruce Hill to fit his wife and new kid, he launched the new venture, allowing the older, more established NoLibs site to continue on its own. Myers is focused now on growing coverage and interest, but while the WHYY radio producer — he is unaffiliated and said he was unaware of the nonprofit’s Web interest in the northwest — has a steady day job, he isn’t ignoring the potential to make West Philly News stable through profitability.

“If you look at the neighborhood locals, like a UC Review or the North Star, you have a staff of a half-dozen people or so who are supported by advertisers and are also printing a much more expensive project,” he says. “If you had only a fraction of the advertisers in the weekly and help from neighborhood people, you could support a staff of… a couple reporters and a sales rep working at least part-time.”

It’s a model being employed in another portion of the city and elsewhere in the region.

NEast Philly, which covers the more than two dozen neighborhoods and 300,000 people of Northeast Philadelphia through aggregation, unpaid columnists and occasional reader-fueled reporting, is pursuing monetization already, first through advertising [Full Disclosure: The staff of Technically Philly has personal and professional relationships with the founder of NEast Philly, and this author is an occasional contributor to the site].

Founder Shannon McDonald, 22, has teamed up with several other Northeast natives, including the former editor of the now defunct community newspaper the Northeast News Gleaner. They plan on bringing in revenue by the year’s end, McDonald says.

Bryan Shipenberg, a Bala Cynwyd-based graphic designer, launched a less sleek, if more localized, site focused on a business district in suburban Montgomery County’s Lower Merion, called Bala Avenue. For now, it’s little more than aggregation and press release regurgitation, but he’s effectively squatting on the profitable hyperlocal news trend.

“I believe that a year from now when the township lays the Cynwyd Trail and finishes the rehab of the Cynwyd station, people will come. When they open the Manayunk bridge more people will come,” Shipenberg, who also maintains a site for the Friends of the Cynwyd Heritage Trail, wrote Technically Philly in an e-mail. “With a little infusion of money BalaAvenue.com will become a great resource for the region.”

But not quite yet.

THE PRESENT PARSED FROM THE FUTURE

So very nearly all of the region’s hyperlocal products remain the passions of part-timers: largely fueled by aggregation and plans for the future, not quite ready to fill a hole left by a lost print counterpart, but surely adding to the conversation.

Even AroundMainLine faces limitations. Lockard, its founder, can use her sales background to fill her site with advertising, but, with occasional exception, she is the site’s sole content creator. Beyond profitability and depth, Collins, the LaSalle professor, called foul on the possibility for online news makers to fulfill all the needs of localized coverage anytime soon, considering constraints of the digital divide and other concerns.

In Philadelphia, no one is replacing the print weeklies, big dailies and established TV and radio news-gathering entities just yet, it seems, but many betting on the hyperlocal trend are quite a bit more optimistic.

“Big companies are already starting to pull away from print and eyeballs are too,” says Lockard of AroundMainLine. “This is where publishing and communications are headed, so we want to be there first.”

Below, watch new media pundit Jeff Jarvis and TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington talk hyperlocal news at a conference in Munich, Germany from February.

-30-

Every Monday, Technically Not Tech will feature people, projects, and businesses that are involved with Philly�s tech scene, but aren�t necessarily technology focused. See others here.

The Philadelphia Inquirer will launch a paid-content model on its Web site before the end of the year, according to a commemorative online package that will appear Sunday.

Philadelphia’s paper of record will debut the special multimedia presentation on Philly.com to commemorate its 180th anniversary, which Technically Philly was given a preview of today.

See our sneak peek at the project here.

The presentation includes a news story attributing the mention of paid content to Brian Tierney, Philadelphia Media Holdings Publisher and Chief Executive. Further details about the plans were not provided.

Inquirer Executive Online Editor Chris Krewson could not confirm the time line or the decision, but said that Tierney has spoken publicly about the possibility.

“In the past three months it’s been pretty clear from Brian’s statements that there will be a move to paid content on the Internet,” Krewson said in a telephone interview with Technically Philly.

“It would not surprise me at all to see us do something with paid content by the end of the year.”

Still, Krewson said that there are no plans for paid content in the immediate development pipeline. “There won’t be a pay wall anytime soon. For various technical reasons, we actually couldn’t do that if we wanted to.”

Top executives of the newspaper industry, including Philadelphia Media Holdings, met discreetly in Chicago Thursday to discuss online content monetization strategies, The Atlantic reported.

Though Tierney has been mum about PHM’s plans for online monetization, he has spoken to the importance of a paid online model.

While speaking at the Wharton Leadership Lunch at the University of Pennsylvania in February, Tierney contended that if the Web is to be the primary mode of content delivery, a paid subscription form would have to develop, according to Akkam’s Razor, a Philadelphia blog.

“Everyone wants content to be free,” he explained, “but you can’t do what we do and have content be free.”

The 1800-word commemorative article, written by Inquirer staff writer Jeff Gammage, reports on how the newspaper will continue to exist in years to come. Tierney is quoted in support of a paid content model.

“This idea of free access to your content is fundamentally as silly as we all thought it was 10 years ago,” Tierney said. “I think people will be willing to pay for quality journalism.”

Staff writers Sean Blanda and Christopher Wink contributed to this story.

Full Disclosure: All three founders of Technically Philly have done work for the Philadelphia Inquirer.