Amidst all the stories of troubles in the news industry, the one hope always seems to be that somehow online news will take up the slack. Yet most of the time, while everyone talks about how it would be great if online news would take up the slack, few seem to do anything about actually bringing higher quality local news online.

Wednesday, the Knight Foundation announced the the first winners of the Knight Community Information Challenge. At the top of the list comes “A hyperlocal news site staffed by professional journalists and citizen contributors in the five ethnically diverse towns of Connecticut's Lower Naugatuck Valley”.

The Valley Independent Sentinel proposal was submitted by the The Community Foundation for Greater New Haven. The Foundation works with the Online Journalism Project to support of the New Haven Independent. The Knight Foundation grant will be used to support an affiliated organization, the Valley Community Foundation which will create the Valley Independent Sentinel.

Paul Bass, the executive director of the Online Journalism Project says that the Valley Foundation is contracting with OJP to produce the new site. It will launch in mid-2009, following a model similar to the New Haven Independent. It will be an online only site, publishing multiple stories daily, five days a week. It will be staffed by professional journalists with heavy reader interaction and strong use of multimedia.

Here in Woodbridge, we are fairly fortunate to have sites like the Amity Observer and the Orange Bulletin covering local events, although I would love to see much more coverage in Woodbridge. However, as you get deeper into the valley, there is even more of a need of good, in depth local coverage.

For other online developments, I was recently contacted by ‘Roxy’ of Roxiticus Desperate Housewives. She has set up a set of websites, Roxy’s Best Of.... She’s from New Jersey so most of her sites so far have been centered on the Garden State. However, she is expanding into Connecticut and has set up Roxy’s Best Of ... Connecticut.

Roxy’s Best Of ... seems to reside somewhere between the hyperlocal journalism of sites like the New Haven Independent, reviews on sites like Yelp and the community of bloggers on sites like MyBlogLog, EntreCard and Adgitize. My sense is that it is a set of sites for fun narrative reviews of really good local places.

As a supporter of local companies and of positive news stories, I think Roxy has a good idea. She’s asked me to write for the Best Of sites in Connecticut. She has said that it is fine if I cross-post material to my own blog, that there is no pressure on posting according to any deadlines, and that if it turns into something that produces revenue, she will be sharing revenue with her writers. While it probably won’t be producing the hard journalism that the New Haven Independent does, it will be a valuable additional to local information.

On a more family oriented basis, @jcnork, whom I met through Twitter and lives in the next town over has a new blog post up about the State of the Norkosphere. He mentions the blog that his brother keeps about being in the Peace Corp in Romania, and a blog that his son has set up. Jack hasn’t been blogging much as he spends more and more time on Twitter, but it would be great to see him doing more long form writing.

Whether you are looking for good journalism, stories about good people to do business with around Connecticut, or simply good family stories, things look like they are moving in a good direction online around Woodbridge, CT.