A post on Mashable today issues an Earth-Day timely list of iPhone apps angled toward green living. I downloaded a couple of them, including iRecycle, and they’re a nice addition to my mobile smart phone.  Of particular interest are the apps that are geo-location aware when supplying content.  iRecycle tags your location and tells you where you can recycle specific kinds of items. That kind of information has previously meant a difficult dig into the vaults of traditional media. Now it is (theoretically, if not always practically) in the palm of your hands as you think of it.  Looking for a place to live, or just curious about what kinds of mess might be in your paddling path?  GreenSpace Map finds you, and plots nearby points of toxic release potential, brownfields, or (yikes) superfund sites. A little nod from the EPA in your pocket, and I sincerely mean that in a good way.

As the definitions of news, advertising and marketing continue to evolve into something far better than traditional media has ever been able to offer, location-aware mobile apps figure to rule the day.

Adam Klawonn’s Top Five Lessons from the Failure of the Zonie Report should really be retitled, substituting “failure” with “experience.” But one thing I’ve discovered is that many hyperlocal startups and their oft-one-man creators tend to be humble in their efforts, more interested in learning and sharing about emerging media models than crowing about their expertise.  And that makes all the difference in credibility, of course.

More evidence of this comes in a link relayed last week by a colleague. The Future Newsroom: Lean, Open and Social-Media Savvy compares two online media outlets at Penn State University. One is the stalwart site of a hundred-year-old campus newspaper, the other something quite new that takes a far more modern approach to the same community.  At a glance, the better product couldn’t be more clear. Still the editor of the newspaper site clings to the conventional wisdom.

Editor-in-Chief Rossilynne Skena said that while social media is “great for getting out short bursts of information,” the Collegian’s competitive advantage is “really going into depth and detail about a particular subject,” complete with perspectives from local leaders.

Let me guess. The same “local leaders” who have a dozen other available megaphones for their viewpoint every freaking day? And this provides the “depth and detail”?

Sure, sites like Onward State might hinge entirely on one or two dedicated people for stability, and can’t be counted on just yet as permanent fixtures in their environment.  But let’s be blunt. They’re doing better work, with a lot fewer resources. And that matters.

Making the rounds, including over at Signal v. Noise, is a quote taken from the recent documentary Food, Inc.

I have no desire to scale up or get bigger. My desire is to produce the best food in the world. And if in doing so, more people come to our corner and want stuff, then heaven help me figure out how to meet the need without compromising the integrity.

As soon as you grasp for that growth, you’re gonna view your customer differently, you’re gonna view your product differently, you’re gonna view your business differently. Everything that is the most important – you’re going to view that differently.
— Joel Salatin

The comments underneath it at Signal v. Noise tell a story in themselves. Some get it perfectly, others just can’t make it there because the idea of purposely not growing (scaling) a business seems alien.

In the media world today, “scaling” is the default strategy for making money with the internet, displayed daily in testimony like:

• The way to revenue is more pageviews, more visitors. Throw stuff on that site to get everyone interested. Bigger traffic = bigger revenue.
• Better still, find that ripe niche market  (hopefully a niche with a hundred million participants, like Moms or football fans) and then, quick as possible, spread that niche everywhere. Take it global, baby.
• Got a product that’s working at a neighborhood level?  Real, on-the-ground hyperlocal stuff? Quick, figure a way to roll it out to every neighborhood in the tri-state area.

It’s madness, really.

How ’bout this instead? Find a market or a community or a topic for which you have sincere interest. Maybe find a few others with compatible skills who share interest (not mere financial interest) in the same thing, and go to work on it.  Tune it up until it makes enough income to keep you and your partners gainfully employed and happy with it, all the while staying true to its original purpose. Could be that it will only earn enough to be “one” of several endeavors you dabble in, but that’s okay too.

I suspect that’s where 95% of  journalism is headed – very small outfits of talented media folk, focused on a limited audience, with no expectation or even aspiration for million-dollar budgets, hiring plans, or corporate apparatus.