By Daniela Gerson: Facing City Hall in Alhambra, California, a predominantly Asian and Latino suburb just east of Los Angeles, a life-size bronze statue of a man sits holding a newspaper. A plaque says the statue is dedicated to the memory of Warner Jenkins, "Alhambra's beloved journalist/chronicler." That is the closest a journalist gets to Alhambra's City Hall most days. Local news coverage in the municipality of roughly 90,000 is severely lacking. What exists tends to be in Chinese or crime coverage in the area's larger dailies. USC's Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, responding to the dearth of reporting on Alhambra and the challenge of creating a media outlet in an ethnically and linguistically diverse area, launched the Alhambra Project in 2008. Michael Parks, former director of the journalism school and former editor of the Los Angeles Times, and Sandra Ball-Rokeach, a communication researcher and director of the Metamorphosis Project, collaborated with support from the Annenberg Foundation. Parks was interested in investigating how local news coverage could better serve communities. Ball-Rokeach, whose research had previously found that the Alhambra area had one of the lowest levels of civic engagement in Los Angeles County, wanted to explore how creating a news product grounded in local needs could improve that level of engagement. I joined the project in early summer of last year. As a journalist with a background in immigration reporting ? and with a smattering of community organizing skills, including managing a Brooklyn farmer's market and running a small non-profit magazine ? my assignment was to take the research ideas and help translate them into an online news source grounded in local needs.

By Robert Niles: Last week, I wrote about my skepticism of Patch.com, based on my assumption that the economies of scale available to a national chain of local publications online were no longer enough to overcome to the inherent cost advantages enjoyed by locally-owned publications. Locally-owned publications don't have to generate enough income to support regional managers and national executives. And if they're boot-strapped, they don't have to pay back VC or investors, either. That gives a local start-up a huge cost advantage in what's become a brutal online publishing market. If you're going to start an investor-funded national chain of local news websites, you're going to need to achieve some economies of scale that allow you to make enough extra income - as a chain - to overcome the cost advantage enjoyed by your locally-owned competitors. I dismissed several such ways that newspaper chains achieved that in the past, arguing that they'd been made irrelevant by the Internet. But a reader challenged me: Are there any economies of scale that could help make a national chain of local online news sites profitable? Hey, I love a challenge. So here are two I thought of this week:

On Saturday 21 August 2010, sisters Marcia Rigg-Samuel and Samantha Rigg-David were joined by family, friends and members of the public in marking the second anniversary of the death of their brother Sean Rigg, killed during an altercation with police in Brixton on 21 August 2008.

Two events in memory of Mikey Powell who died after being restrained by West Midlands police officers from Thornhill Road police station on 7 September 2003.

The No One is Illegal group is holding a meeting in Manchester.

A demonstration in solidarity with Roma people who are being evicted and expelled from France.

A special screening of

A seminar on Malcolm X's often forgotten visits to Africa and Britain, given by Marika Sherwood.

The launch of the Medical Justice report 'State sponsored cruelty: the immigration detention of children'.

An anti-racist student organiser discusses, in the light of the upcoming English Defence League (EDL) event in Bradford, what anti-fascists can learn about recent state interventions and particularly the policing of anti-fascist demonstrations.

An annual conference featuring discussions and workshops about City of Sanctuary initiatives across the UK.

A play chronicling the struggle for women's rights and equal pay.

A seminar offering practical advice on writing medico-legal reports for immigration matters.

The second memorial vigil for Sean Rigg, who died in police custody at Brixton Police Station in 2008.

The rights of asylum seekers were upheld in two recent court judgments - but those facing deportation on national security grounds were denied justice in a third.

The National Coalition of Anti-Deportation Campaigns AGM, including workshops and discussion groups.

An infonight on the NoBorders camp to be held in Brussels later this year.

At least 10 percent of the population in Bolivia is believed to be carrying the parasite for Chagas disease. Few people, including medical staff, are aware of its prevalence, but MSF is running a ground-breaking program there. Also hear how MSF is offering mental health care to those affected by continuing violence on the island of Mindanao in the Philippines. And learn how MSF is providing health care in Balochistan province in Pakistan, where decades of insecurity has made medical services rare.

In this special edition, we focus on the deteriorating situation for civilians and medical workers in Mogadishu, Somalia. Somalia has been wracked by violence for nearly 16 years now. But the past months has seen some of the worst fighting ever in the capital, Mogadishu. Access to medical care and assistance for civilians and displaced persons in and around the war-ravaged Somali capital has decreased alarmingly in the past few months. Kris Torgeson has this report from Nairobi, Kenya, where MSF spoke out against the dire humanitarian situation in Mogadishu. Visit us at www.doctorswithoutborders.org or www.msf.org.