Awesome.

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Facebook has two very big pieces of news that they announced today at TechCrunch50. The first: They have crossed 300 million users worldwide now, extending their lead as the biggest social network. The second: They are now cash flow positive. Yes, from this point forward, Facebook is making money.

Local media companies take note. Here are three items that will make or break sites in local markets:

1. Community is essential to building your presence online. Simply delivering the news won’t cut it anymore.

2. That community must be built in tandem with data on who’s in the community.

3. Interoperability with social networking platforms is a must, from OpenID and Google Friend Connect, to Facebook Connect and Twitter OAuth. No matter how feature rich and totally awesome your product is, if the barriers to entry are too high, no one will care. MAKE EVERYTHING EASY.

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Noting that the overall advertising pie isn’t really getting any bigger, is there any clearer explanation of why newspapers need to turn into digital enterprises in a hurry?

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Cost-cutting newspapers are losing many of their youngest reporters, editors and photographers at the same time publishers are trying to break some of their old habits and learn new tricks on the Internet.

This is not a good trend. Younger generations will always have more technical aptitude than older generations as a whole. That’s because they will have grown up inculcated with technology and taken if for granted, whereas older generations are adding yet another layer of knowledge into an already crammed base.

There will of course be some exceptions, but what this story is really about is not modern online-only digital newsrooms. It’s about traditional newsrooms.

The era of the pure-play online newsroom is emerging. Will traditional media companies be able to compete? Time will tell.

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Facebook has posted on their blog that they are launching a feature allowing Facebook Page admins to update their FB Page and Twitter at the same time.

This should help streamline a lot of social media efforts for local media types.

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Pretty neat stuff.

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Sharein, the new bookmarklet-based service for link sharing which launched earlier this summer, has just today introduced some new features which further solidify this up-and-comer as the new must-have tool for sharing links on the web. The service, already an easy way to share to Twitter, Facebook, and via email, is most notable for its ability to track statistics like views on the backend, a feature that should appeal to marketers looking for hard data on their social media efforts.

Today, the analytics feature has been enhanced to provide even more data than before, this time with a specific focus on Facebook shares. Also new today is the integration of Tweetmeme and Digg data into shares as well as YouTube stats for video shares. For anyone using Facebook to promote their content, Sharein has just made itself indispensible.

The great thing about the web is the speed at which innovative ideas branch out. Sharein appears to be making an attempt to wrap up all of your sharing needs in one spot.

This should be a big deal to local media, mainly because of the tracking capabilities. Honing your social media efforts to their most effective potential is key, and if you aren’t tracking on the back end, there’s likely a whole lot of waste and inefficiency.

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The Washington Post said Tuesday that it will shut down LoudounExtra.com as a separate Internet site. The two-year-old site had been described as a push into hyperlocal journalism.

The newspaper said in a statement that it found that the “experiment with LoudounExtra.com as a separate site was not a sustainable model.”

Part of this is because the site’s creator, Rob Curley, and his team, took off for Las Vegas. And part of this is because at a certain point, the viability of a hyperlocal approach will depend on local rates of technology adoption and population density.

Seattle has tons of successful hyperlocal coverage precisely because of those two factors. It’s always been a hotbed for technological innovation and it is not a giant mass of suburban sprawl. The same models might be used in any of the great Northeastern cities like New York or Boston.

On the flipside, markets like Atlanta, and/or more far flung suburbs like Loudoun County ( one of DC’s ‘burbs) might not have enough density to form the type of community feeling that arises when people are forced to interact on a regular basis due to population density.

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