The Mahalo-fication of News Gathering . . .

Mahalo, Jason Calcanis' current baby, is an interesting concept. In a nutshell, searching the internet effectively requires a human touch, and most people value their time more than they do the results to queries, but that's not the case for everyone, and there's enough folks out there who have the searching skills, and the time, and the need for cash.

The internet is practically to the point where that the answer for just about every question has already been answered and is sitting on some webpage to whatever degree of detail you desire or can handle. Mahalo uses a tipping system, and crowdsourcing, to give people with more money than time a way to reward people with more time than money for providing them with a service.

I'm not personally convinced that this is a business model that can succeed, but stranger things have happened.

But there's an area where this type of model could be hugely effective, profitable enough, and fill a gaping void in the daily life of folks across the country, and across the world. Used to be, most communities had a local daily paper, now, not so much.

What I can see happening is taking the Mahalo model of 'crowdsourcing', and applying it to local news. Local news has died most places, nothing has replaced it, blogs can't do it, TV news doesn't want the job, but I believe there is both a thirst and a need for this hyper-local news, especially reporting on quality of life issues (crime, traffic, local business, local government). I think you could have a mix of moderated/unmoderated sections for each neighborhood (zipcodes would be a good way to break up each area), with the moderated section acting as a front page with edited articles, reviews of local businesses, ads and offers, and other things of local interest. A payment system mixing cash money with a system of discounts to local businesses would be the way to go, it would be a way to encourage businesses to participate, knowing that these pages would be a way to reach locals, and it would reward locals for participating by saving them money in places they already go to, or supplementing their income.

If this was profitable enough, then you could hire old fashioned 'beat' reporters/editors to coordinate the submissions and check the accuracy of the submissions from the users. There's room for professionals and users to cooperate on stories.

The key for success would be to keep it as local as possible, while making it easy to navigate between locales, so that if you can find out all the happenings in your region, or any place you might be curious about, to whatever level of detail suits your interests.

I'm convinced that there are plenty of folks out there who would love to delve into their local government and either praise smart leadership or more likely, expose corruption, or write up a piece on their favorite barbershop, or interview police about the more colorful local prostitutes. The stories are out there, but there isn't a system to pull these potential columns together, or a way to compensate people for their time.

Solve that problem (and a moderated tipping system like Mahalo has might be the answer), and I think a lot of people would start each day with a website like that, check it often, and look forward to submitting their own articles from time to time.