comScore is reporting that the number of people who sought local information on a mobile device grew 51 percent from March 2008 to March 2009. The number of people accessing online directories has seen the greatest increase during the past year (73 percent), followed by restaurants (70 percent), maps (63 percent) and movies (60 percent).

Continue ReadingReport: Mobile Audience for Local Content is Up

The CBC reports that an afternoon thunderstorm yesterday "brought almost 500 lightning strikes to Calgary," and Fast Forward Weekly publisher Ian Chiclo says one of them hit his paper's office. "Publisher's computer fried, bits of wall land beside his chair," Chiclo wrote in an email to AAN News yesterday. Reached this morning, he tells us that the office is functioning again, but "limping," with only three computers having access to the internet and the paper's servers. "We think some of the wires are fried," he says.

Continue ReadingLightning Strikes Fast Forward Weekly Office

SF Weekly reports the city of San Francisco is reaching out to a handful of websites to potentially run public notice ads, including the website of the San Francisco Bay Guardian. But Guardian publisher Bruce Brugmann says the paper has no intention of participating. "We don't bid, or go in for these city contracts, and we don't intend to do it now," he tells the Weekly.

Continue ReadingBay Guardian Says it Won’t Run City’s Public Notice Ads on Website

"New tools or technologies that enable people to report or publish inevitably give birth to new forms of correction," Craig Silverman writes for CJR in a piece looking at how several individuals and news organization handle making corrections on Twitter. "The end result, I think, is that for all of its failings -- and lord knows no one talks about them more than me -- the correction has proven adept at moving from one medium to the next." MORE ON TWITTER: Editor & Publisher's Joe Strupp says many editors are still unsure of how to police staffers' Twitter and Facebook use.

Continue ReadingHow Twitter Users Are Dealing With Corrections

As expected, Village Voice Media and SF Weekly filed an appeal to last year's decision in the Guardian's predatory pricing suit this week in the California Court of Appeal. "With this appeal, judicial error, attorney contrivance, expert witness puffery, juror confusion, and statutory imprecision are now cast in the edifying light of reason and clarity," VVM executive editor Michael Lacey says. The Guardian's Tim Redmond says nothing in VVM's appeal is new to them. "We're confident we'll prevail in the appeal, as we did at the trial court level," he tells AAN News.

Continue ReadingVVM Files Appeal in Bay Guardian Case

Responding to yesterday's blog post by Washington City Paper editor Erik Wemple, Arianna Huffington tells the New York Times' David Carr that someone at HuffPo did contact City Paper to ask that the new blog posts on their HuffPo April Fool's parody be taken down, but that they "never complained" about the page linking back to HuffPo. "Bottom line: We didn't -- and don't -- have a problem with someone having fun at our expense," she says. "Indeed, we loved it and complimented it."

Continue ReadingHuffington: ‘We Never Had an Issue’ With City Paper Parody