After a conversation with the BBC’s Martin Rosenbaum at Hacks and Hackers, I started to understand that regional journalism has a particular set of needs and problems when it comes to data journalism. National news needs big picture data from which it can draw big trends. Government ata that groups England into its nine official regions works fine for broad sweeps; data that breaks down by city or county works well too.

These first five grants that we’re announcing today are just the beginning. Learn more about the initiative, and how to submit an idea, by visiting www.technologyforegagement.org.

Crowdmap is a tool that allows you to crowdsource information and see it on a map and timeline.

Poking around in The New York Times’s job listings, I found this description of three distinct internships “in the Web Newsroom of The New York Times”:

Adam Bain, previously serving as the head of News Corp.'s Fox Audience Network (the conglomerate's unit for online advertising operations, technology, and sales; prior to that, Bain had been News Corp. chief technology officer) has joined Twitter with the lofty title of "president of global revenue."

n the past it was worth occasionally checking out newspapers' robots.txt files as they listed the URLs of stories that they've had to withdraw for legal reasons (or joke Polish editions). Sadly, they don't seem to do that so much these days (and they'd get lost in the Mirror's massive file). Plus there's no easy way to check if they've been updated – Google Reader's ability to track changing webpages doesn't work with robots.txt files. Boo.

Total revenues at the owner of the Scotsman and the Yorkshire Evening Post were £207.3m in the first half of this year, down 5.2% on the first six months of 2009.

"What, if anything, the term ‘hyperlocal’ now means is something that keeps coming up in conversations I have and it strikes me that it’s no longer necessarily defined by a tight geographical area, but instead seems to have evolved to describe more of an attitude than a place."

The former digital media publisher of Times Newspapers, Zach Leonard, has been appointed as the new managing director of digital for the Independent and the London Evening Standard.