Group-buying service Tippr has announced the launch of an affiliate network program this morning to supplement the company’s featured white-label product. Publishers who use Powered by Tippr software to host daily deals will be able to syndicate these offers across a network of affiliate sites —  including major aggregators like Yipit and Yahoo Deals as well as over 1,000 hyperlocal and vertical niche publications.

At the heart of the move are three essential principles: Creation, Curation and Community. What does that actually mean for the newsroom in real terms?

Newspaper companies can talk the talk of becoming multimedia companies, but most are still text-bound. WSJ Live is a news video product that does a great job of leveraging the new technologies of the day and converging them to create an easy-on-the-eyes, easy-to-use new consumer product.

There are no shortage of helpful apps available for the reporter who needs to cover news on the go. We’ve covered apps for both iPhones and Android devices, and Meporter is a great addition to the hundreds of apps available for journalism.

Fact-checking has seen an interesting progression in recent years, evolving into a stand-alone form of news — as evidenced not just by PolitiFact (a project of the St. Petersburg Times) but also by Factcheck.org, and NewsTrust’s new TruthSquad site. Instead of simply being an ingredient in reporting, fact-checking went front and center, working as the main content for a site or in concert with other stories. 

Since we last checked in with Homicide Watch D.C., Laura Amico has continued to make good on her site’s promise: Mark every death. Remember every victim. Follow every case. There are just two problems with the Homicide Watch model. One, the work is relentless and Amico is only one person. And two, she isn’t making a penny.

Local media’s winning combination of established brands with built-in audiences, connected sales forces and unmatched promotional reach have positioned them for major gains in the deals space.

The results help illustrate the growing connection between global health and digital tools. The goal is to help improve the behavioral shifts, to leverage technology and to improve health.

The paper explores a new way to distribute its content — through the crowds of users on Facebook.

A Groupon deal might boost sales but, it can also lower a merchant's reputation as measured by Yelp ratings, say computer scientists who have analyzed the link between daily deals and online reviews.

CSS-101’s prototyping snippet, which overlays a grid or mock-up over the page that you’re styling so that you can edit the content directly in the browser

With this simple little bookmarklet, you can add or change styles on a live website right in your browser. Installing it is easy: just drag it to your bookmarks toolbar. The window is resizable, so you can make it as large or small as you need to when editing.

The guys over at MapBox have come up with something that will save many of us the hassle of making maps look good. They’ve created TileMill, a modern map design platform that enables designers to easily create map designs using custom data. The tool is built on the open-source map-rendering library Mapnik and covers a variety of maps, from globe to street level.

The path to the future of fitness relies on massive data aggregation, social elements and convenience. While it’s fascinating to track your weight, your height, BMI, running patterns and your caloric intake, future intelligence will rely on much more than that. It will know the history of your injuries, your genetics, your complete biometric data and not just about your activity today but also how external conditions play their part such as your geographic location, weather patterns, your social graph and what music you’re listening to.

Playing Onefeat involves a series of missions which you can choose to complete, by taking a photograph that fits a certain description or criteria. You can create your own missions, encouraging other people to complete them, as well as complete other people’s missions – or in Onefeat lingo, perform a feat.

TechCrunch Disrupt finalist Pressly is an HTML5-based platform that turns online publications into tablet-friendly websites that work on the iPad, Android tablets or the BlackBerry PlayBook. The sites it produces are nearly indistinguishable from their native counterparts, like Flipboard and Zite for example, offering a similar experience for browsing through articles, images and videos. Navigation is designed for the tablet interface, using common gestures like multi-touch swipes and pinches.

A little app from ZURB that helps you critique your web designs, giving you that kick you need to make them better.

If you’ve planned an event on the web recently, you may have organized it via Eventbrite. The platform has been used to sell more than 36 million tickets to hundreds of thousands of events. Eventbrite lets you offer tickets at different prices and is integrated with social platforms to help users get the word out about your event, and eventgoers can pay via PayPal or Google Checkout.

Distributing digital content across multiple devices – PCs, smartphones and tablets – requires publishers to re-think their approach not just to delivery, but to design as well. Do you build apps from the ground up, or are cross-platform techniques such as responsive design the right path? This week, we look at a variety of approaches to solving the cross-platform design dilemma.

The new subscription-based site, based on responsive design and built on HTML5, will automatically adapt to desktop, tablet and smartphone screen sizes. It’s a more seamless (and ultimately less expensive) alternative to developing native apps.

Zaarly aims to bring local buyers and sellers of both goods and services together easily, taking the hassle out of errands and odd jobs. Where once you might have cruised Craigslist or called around to friends to find a man with a van or an Ikea assembly genius, now you pop your request and what you’re willing to pay onto Zaarly and local folks bid for the job and fulfill your request without stress.

Community PlanIt, a web-based social network that turns planning — in this case, designing standards for gauging school performance — into a big game. This isn’t just for grown-ups, though. Students, teachers, parents, and administrators alike are encouraged to play (nicely), and participation is rewarded with virtual currency. It’s an attempt to apply game dynamics to the pedestrian world of public comment.

All the websites will include touch-screen enabled elements, for instance a slide show (also known as a rotator) on the homepage of Good Housekeeping, which is manipulate by a mouse click when accessed via P.C. but is touch operated when accessed via smartphones and tablets.  

Earlier this week we looked at the remarkable growth of Tumblr, a blogging and curation service that now gets over 12 billion page views per month. Tumblr is mostly used as a consumer curation tool – it's an easy way for people to re-post articles, images and videos. But Tumblr can also be used to power a news website. That's exactly what ShortFormBlog does.

When it comes to advertising, the four Patch sites I reviewed in August all relied heavily on national advertising, while three were also attracting a significant amount of local ads. Patch local business directories also figure in the revenue mix.

Under their partnerships with Fisher, Dunlap and Campbell and their basically one-person operations get access to the company’s considerable resources, including KOMO TV station in Seattle—staff and equipment like video copters—as well as exposure on KOMO and Fisher Interactive’s own 55 community websites. In exchange, Fisher/KOMO gets access to the often deep neighborhood coverage of the two indie sites.

Content syndication has taken on a whole new meaning in the digital world. Most publishers want to get their content distributed as widely as possible to attract a broader audience and drive advertising or subscription revenue. The tactics for syndicating content – across search, social and mobile channels as well as traditional licensing – are as varied as the content itself. Here are some resources to help fine-tune your syndication efforts.

"It seems to me that Digital First is much more likely to solve the problem of building strong — and profitable — web-based local media than is AOL’s Patch," writes Felix Salmon. "The first and most important reason is that local newspapers are, and always have been, the first best source of local ad-sales talent. … On the other side of the editorial divide, local newspapers are also the first best source of local news, and are generally much more respected and trusted in local communities than any cookie-cutter Patch site is likely to become."

Bizzy allows users to rate and share their opinions of local businesses with followers and friends as well as discover cafes, bars, and restaurants through personalized recommendations that draw on users social graphs and previous ratings.

mid much hoopla and skepticism about Patch, AOL’s group of 800-plus hyperlocal news sites, little has been said about the sites themselves. How much news do they produce? How do their users interact with them? To find out, Anna Tarkov took a closer look at four Patch sites around the country for a month.