Morning short takes: Reed Elsevier sells off German business unit to EPPG; ogling Google Goggles

Dow Jones is reporting that Reed Elsevier has sold off its German trade publishing arm to European Professional Publishing Group.

Buchreport also reports that the two former managing directors Hans Jürgen Kuntze and André Weijden will remain on board.

RBI-US continues to make news, even as it continues to sell off or close parts of its US operations. Yesterday, Variety, one of the few properties new CEO Erik Engstrom said the company is committed to, announced it had fired long time film critic Todd McCarthy.

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Is AT&T crippling their new Android phones as a way at getting back at Google for their stance on net neutrality? It would be an incredibly self-defeating act, if true -- and wouldn't exactly improve AT&T's already dismal customer satisfaction position (worst among US carriers).

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Speaking of Google . . . I want this on my iPhone: Google Goggles (linked story is actually about Google Translate, but it refers and links to a Google blog post about Goggles). Unfortunately, it looks like this handy tool that allows users to take pictures of printed text and have instant translations, or take a picture of a landmark and get additional information, will be an Android-only product.  Here is a video that demonstrates the product:

Texterity launches their first magazine-branded native iPhone app for Premiere Guitar

Texterity announced today that they had launched their first magazine-branded native iPhone app for Premiere Guitar.

The iPhone app refreshes the content when the reader launches the app, and allows the reader to search past issues and post comments from within the app.

“When we launched the first web-based digital magazines for the iPhone and iPod touch in 2007, it was an immediate hit. Our non-Flash solution worked great with only some minor changes for the small screen," said Texterity COO Carl Scholz. "But this new, magazine-branded native iPhone app takes things one step further by giving publishers a highly visible, dynamic mobile solution that drives readers back to their digital edition between publishing cycles.”

Texterity claims that its browser based, non-Flash mobile solution will easily work for Apple's soon to be available iPad, as well as the iPhone and iPod Touch.

The push back begins: Apple looks to limit the proliferation of cookie-cutter iPhone apps within iTunes app store

If it's free there must be a catch, right? For publishers trying to go mobile on the cheap, the catch when working with discounted or free application developers is often a loss of branding, or ending up with an app that is pretty much worthless.

Because of the proliferation of identical looking, feature-less iPhone applications, Apple is reportedly looking to hold back approval on new applications for the iTunes store that lack basic features, or are identical to other apps.

There has been an explosion of third party vendors that have arisen to feed off the lack of electronic publishing prowess found at most newspaper and magazine companies. From flip books to rudimentary iPhone apps, these vendors have provided the services publishers have needed because of the lack of in-house expertise.

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☜  Some iPhone apps are little more than business cards such as this one, iSusan, for a South Bend realtor.

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Some, like developer Appmakr, have created app generators that allow small and individual publishers to quickly create a new iPhone app for just a few bucks. Appmakr then gets the app through Apple's approval process and onto the iTunes store.

As I wrote back January, those that go this route are doing more to extend Appmakr's brand than their own (all low-cost apps have the Appmakr name attached to the app -- for instance, The College Reports Mobile Built by Appmakr.com). Further, all these apps must be free since Apple only allows those who are registered developers to make paid applications (the process is fairly easy but does include a fee).

Now, according to TechCrunch, Apple may be making a move to scale back the number of me-too apps being created. Many publication apps on the iTunes store are little more than RSS readers, and according to Jason Kincaid's story, Apple would prefer that apps do more than just serve as an alternative to a basic web app.

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Apple rolls out first iPad commercial

OK, they're not targeting the Miles Davis crowd. But beyond that what do you think?

Aggregating and monetizing local news pages; a talk with Outside.In's head of business development, Camilla Cho

It really caught my attention: a help-wanted ad for an advertising sales rep with local media experience . . . not from a newspaper company, but from news aggregating company Outside.In.

Outside.In is looking to hire their first advertising representative to call on interactive agencies in order to sell the millions of impressions they have available on their local news pages -- pages found not only on their own web site, but on the sites of newspapers and broadcasters that use their services to create hyperlocal news pages through their Outside.In for Publishers platform.

The company, backed by Union Square Ventures and other venture firms, as well as CNN, works with newspapers and local broadcasters by creating aggregated local news pages drawn from media outlets as well as bloggers and social media networks.  I spoke with Camilla Cho, VP, Business Development, about her company and her experiences working with the media industry to create these new local news pages.

"We realize that everyone is working on a million things, we realize budgets are not super high," Cho said about her company's media partners.

"When it comes to local, when it comes to hyperlocal, there are a few key areas that they (publishers) are always looking for. That is aggregation, and the capability to really define their neighborhood," said Cho. "And then they want to create hyperlocal, quality pages for monetization for better revenue."

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☜ A local news page from NBC4 in Columbus OH.

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By having hyperlocal news aggregated by a company such as Outside.In, publishers do not need to assign individual editors to each neighborhood or zip code news page created. But for Cho, the key to creating a valuable local news page is still good editing -- or curation, to use the proper term.

"We provide a curation tool through Outside.In for Publishers, and the curation platform makes it as easy as literally clicking a button to suppress any feeds you don't want, you could suppress at the story level or at the feed level."

"Aggregation is great, automation is great, but there has to be some level of curation, some human curation that's layered on top of the automation and aggregation to make a meaningful set of content for the users to consume," said Cho.

The aggregated content originates from some 40,000 RSS feeds, according to the company, as well as content from bloggers writing local news content. Bloggers can sign up on the Outside.In to have their content considered for inclusion, then geo-tagged so it can be properly fed onto the proper local news pages.  The obvious advantage for bloggers to join Outside.In for Bloggers is having traffic driven to their sites.

But what does Cho tell prospective clients, publishers and broadcasters, about the reasons they should include this content?

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Why is Google News so bad? Hyperlocal and entrepreneurial journalists at a disadvantage

A quick thought: after using Google News for a couple of months to seek out relevant news stories to consider for this site one thing is clear: Google News is God-awful.

I suppose many won't find this a surprise, but I'm actually shocked at how bad it is. News stories stay at the top of the search list despite being old and never of value anyway; stories that are actually just links to other stories are featured because they come from traditional media sites, not the source; and finally, Google's idea of news is positively 20th century -- news from old, giant media outlets get top billing, real news is hidden, and "news" sites need to be approved by Google, otherwise Google News doesn't consider content provided by the site as "news".  In other words, if you are a New Media outlet you do not produce news, if you are old media you are part of the club.

Part of the problem lies in how Google defines "news" -- generated by an organization with a team of writers and editors. Clearly the Google folk have never worked at a newspaper. While a newspaper may employ teams of reporters and editors, stories are created by individuals, and most beats are handled by an individual writer. What happens when the newspaper lays off their architectural reporter? The way Google sees the world, if the reporter goes out on their own and creates a new web site and writes stories none of these stories can be considered news. But if one of the stories is picked up and reproduced by their old newspapers then suddenly the content is elevated to Google News status. How quaint.

Clearly this site can never get content to show up on Google News, and that will be a huge disadvantage. But the real issue is not who is a news producer and who is not, but what is news, and what is not. Google News loves press releases that are reproduced by old media outlets, for instance, but not news produced by individual journalists. Because of this, hyperlocal sites are handicapped from the day they launch. To compensate they will have to drive traffic through other aggregators and eventually get picked up by Google News only when their content shows up on a competitors site. Something is terribly wrong about that.