The deal, announced on Tuesday, involves MLB delivering customized video bundles to hometown media outlets after a game ends. “If you’re reading a column from Dan Shaughnessy on Boston.com about Dustin Pedroia’s game-winning home run, you can access video highlights right at the story page level,” said Kevin Gentzel, the CRO of NDN.

The partnership could mean some extra revenue for publishers like the NY Post and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. The papers, along with radio stations, get the video content for free and earn a cut of the advertising revenue that NDN sells for the videos.

Jackson is involved as a frontman and an investor (other investors include Google’s Eric Schmidt and actor Bill Murray). “I’ve played in the tech world for a long time, be it with Microsoft, Cisco or Google. The tech bug hit me about 15 or 20 years ago,” Jackson told me by phone. “I understand the value of participation and the value of attracting eyeballs.”

For Major League Baseball, which is licensing the clips to NDN for an undisclosed amount, the deal is a way to make money from local highlights without undercutting its core product. According to Kenny Gersh, an SVP at MLB Advanced Media, the league is providing about 30 seconds of game footage along with “ancillary content” such as post-game interviews. Gersh added that the deal also makes sense because many fans prefer to get baseball news through a local beat writer.

The partnership shows the ongoing rise of syndication services like NDN and NewsCred. These companies have found a niche as middlemen, removing the friction of licensing amongst copyright owners, advertisers and publishers.

Reggie Jackson fans: here’s a vintage (non-baseball) clip of Mr. October:

Johnston Press, which operates sites for each of its 238 local newspapers, has fallen in to a mess. Trying to chip away at £352 million in debt, on Wednesday it swung to a £143.8 million annual loss, as it wrote £163.7 million off its newspapers’ value and nearly a tenth of its advertising dried up.

Even digital ad sales grew just 0.7 percent over the last year despite a 50 percent larger audience. Shares fell further, to a paltry £0.05, in morning trading.

But that appears a reaction to the results rather than to the positive new future strategy, which Johnston has been sorely lacking for years and which former BBC and Microsoft online executive Highfield, who has been hinting at it for weeks, presented in full along with the numbers.

At the same time, Johnston unveiled football news mobile apps for 10 of its titles and said it is adopting Salesforce for ad sales and Google Apps for email.

But that is just the start…

Highlights: Johnston Press’ 2020 targets:

• Content creation must be split 50/50 between journalists and audience (currently 90/10).
• Print/digital revenue must be 50/50 (currently 95/5).
• “Substantially increase (digital) revenue” - from £18 million in 2011 to £52 million by 2015.
• Digital ARPU must hit £10 per year (currently £2.30).
• All 220 weekly titles must go “digital-first”, some of 18 dailies will be turned weekly.
• Newspaper relaunches (£2 million): new designs, some dailies to go weekly, digital-first workflow
• Subscriptions must rise from three percent of revenue to 50 percent.
• Centralised production.
• “Mobile will be the key growth channel.”
• National as well as local – Johnston will tap related content across its local publishing network to create new vertical content businesses for the whole UK.
• Increase some print prices.

Johnston revealed that some national-level portals already under development include those for entertainment guides and listings, football site, archive photos, all comprising content from across its local sites.

Others may include for wedding events, pet shows, outdoor pursuit expos and mother-and-baby competitions – a parochial staple of local newspapers.

One of New York’s longtime tabloids The Daily News has added a news section to its website called Desi that targets the city’s large South Asian community.

The paper is using technology to siphon South Asian stories from papers around the world. A small staff helps ensure the content reflects the interest of the American diaspora.

According to SVP of Daily News Digital, Steve Lynas, the paper’s research shows that second and third generation immigrants want South Asian news — but they want it presented and curated with American sensibilities. This includes everything from story choice to changing spelling.

The result is stories like “Bollywood actress beheaded,” “Chicken gives birth to live chick at Sri Lankan farm” and “Nepal war children head from poverty to university.” There is also a mix of New York content and a small smattering of original articles.

The Daily News strategy also reflects a new conception of what it means to be “local.”

Local news has long a white whale for media types and resulted in some spectacular failures such as Patch, AOL’s ill-starred hyper-local venture.

The problem may have been that the whole concept of local has been misconceived in the first place.

“I don’t see a zip code as a good filter for community,” said Lynas, who notes that a city block of apartments is often full of people with nothing in common and who don’t want to talk to each other.

By tailoring “local” news to a given culture or ethnography, the Daily News can cover all of New York and beyond.

Lynas adds that the Daily News chose South Asian for their first community section in part because it’s a very educated demographic. Revenue is now based on display advertising but is likely to expand to other forms of marketing like daily deals.

If the new vertical is a success, Lynas says the Daily News will create new verticals to target other cultural groups who are heavily represented in New York.

The Desi content is driven by the technology of NewsCred, a service that provides licensed content from hundreds of sources.

[Correction: an earlier version of this story misspelled the name of Mr. Lynas. We regret the error]