Additional news that developed Monday:

• Guardian Media Group puts paidContent and parent company ContentNext up for sale (AllThingsD)
• New York media executives to NYPD: "The police actions of the last week have been more hostile to the press than any other event in recent memory." (Capital New York)
• Meghan McCain becomes paid contributor for MSNBC (Reuters) | Earlier: Why do news orgs think they can buy authority by hiring political offspring?
• BSkyB to review its journalists' emails to check for signs of illegal behavior (Reuters); Glenn Mulcaire, former private investigator for News of the World, says he didn't delete Milly Dowler's voice mail messages (Press Gazette)
• Participant in James O'Keefe video sting of NPR says he wanted to get more NPR leaders "on the hook" (Slate)

In case you missed it:

• "Reporters do not like being run over by something we did not see coming," writes David Carr about how the Occupy Wall Street protests made an impression on the media (The New York Times)
• Eric Ries examines racial disparity in Silicon Valley (TechCrunch)

Evening reading:

• Howard Owens explains how taking photographs with film is helping him become a better photographer (HowardOwens.com)
• Expansion of DNAinfo shows why New York is such a good hyperlocal incubator (Street Fight) | Related: Hyperlocal site Brooklyn Bureau launches (paidContent.org)
• The seven most overrated Time magazine people of the year (The Huffington Post)

The Richard Jones Journalism Blog
Richard Jones shares 13 things he has learned since starting Saddleworth News to cover his community near Manchester, England. Several focus on how a hyperlocal site is different from a newspaper website: "You can cover the same story as many times as you like," without an editor saying "we did that last week/month/year." He also advises, "It’s not worth trying to be comprehensive," and "don’t cover the same things the local paper does, unless you can do it better." A couple other important lessons for journalists operating independently: (more...)

Street Fight | Vouchification
A group of 20-some hyperlocal news publishers around the country decided at last week's Block by Block conference to form a trade group to provide business services such as liability and health insurance, sales training and revenue studies. Mike Fourcher, who runs Center Square Journal in Chicago, told Street Fight's David Hirschman that the function, members and name of the organization are still in flux, but one thing isn't: It won't include corporate networks like Patch. “They have a completely different set of needs, and we’re not interested in serving their needs,” Fourcher said. Hirschman's take on the group: "While previous incarnations of hyperlocal have focused more on journalists serving their communities than on CPMs, the launch of this group seems to further indicate that publishers are thinking about their sites as revenue-generating entities." || Related: 15 Chicago-area community news sites create an advertising network (Nieman Journalism Lab) | Michele McLellan describes ‘newspaper replacement syndrome’ and other challenges facing independent publishers (Poynter)

Reynolds Journalism Institute
Michele McLellan describes the challenges journalists face as they build independent news sites. The first stage of grief, as she calls it, is "newspaper replacement syndrome," in which people "visualize themselves creating a newspaper on the Web, ignoring the fact that this is a failed model. Instead, publishers who make it to the next stage focus early on about how to create community -- and value around the content." The other stages:

• "Engagement stress disorder," the feeling of being overwhelmed by everything publishers must do to connect with their audiences
• "Sales-phobia," as journalists deal with the reality that they must sell to survive
• "Capacity conundrum," the challenge of being able to expand to take advantage of opportunities
• Growth

Related: Hyperlocal site RiverheadLocal looks for lessons in sustainability at Block by Block summit | How to: Lisa Williams lists 10 skills independent publishers should master | Follow Twitter conversation related to the Block by Block conference.

Howard Owens
Howard Owens writes that the duties described by a Patch editor, while vast, are pretty standard for anyone running an independent news site. "But here’s the thing about the work load for Patch editors: They’re not owners. They are expected to do all of the things they would have to do if they owned their own web sites, but merely in service of building wealth for AOL shareholders. ... Patch editors should know that what they’re being asked to do on salary they could do for themselves far more successfully and with some chance of building a valuable business for themselves and their families." Owens has owned and operated The Batavian, a local news site in upstate New York near Buffalo, since 2009.

Street Fight The marketing coordinator for an independent video store in Seattle tells Stephanie Miles that print offers the best return -- in terms of verifiable foot traffic -- among all her ad spending, which includes advertising on hyperlocal sites and alternative weeklies, discounts for public radio supporters and promotions for Foursquare users. "Print works well," says Jen Koogler of Scarecrow Video. "These things are really hard to track, but when we put a coupon in an ad, for example, people will actually come in with that coupon clipped out of the paper and say, 'I saw this was on sale.'" Because the store offers a discount to members of a public radio station, she can track that, too. But she doesn't have a sense of the return she gets for ads on hyperlocal sites because she doesn't get regular clickthrough reports. She's lukewarm on Foursquare, saying, "We don’t really get a lot of check-ins." In the original version of the story (since corrected) Koogler said that she advertises with Next Door Media, but Cory Bergman says that the last time Scarecrow advertised with the company was a year to 18 months ago. Amy Duncan, publisher of My Green Lake, where Scarecrow does have a current ad, said the ad is handled by another hyperlocal site. (Disclosure: Cory Bergman is a member of Poynter's National Advisory Board.)

Romenesko+ Misc. | DigiDave
David Cohn, who launched community-funded reporting site Spot.Us in 2008, will be conducting research on economic models of online journalism publications and help to develop business products for supporting hyperlocal news sites. He'll be working with three community sites run by the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism: MissionLocal.org, OaklandNorth.net and RichmondConfidential.org. "These sites will be testing grounds for experimentation to aid in the research for building sustainable business models for small news websites," says a press release. Cohn writes on his blog that he'll "remain an active part of Spot.Us and in the coming weeks we should have some exciting news which will cement it as an ongoing business (elevated from a mere experiment) for at least another two years." (more...)