Fwix, a one-year-old start-up backed by BlueRun Ventures, is one of a growing number of portals for “hyperlocal” news, a buzzword that refers to sites about schools, culture, gossip and other information on a neighborhood level. Other hyperlocal aggregators include Outside.In and EveryBlock. Some, like Patch, have their own staff, while others, like Fwix, mostly organize news written by bloggers and community members.

Now Fwix is launching a new advertising product, AdWire, and agreeing to split revenue with the people who write the local information, laying down the gauntlet against big news aggregators from Google on down.

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Representing new media, in a discussion over the future of journalism, are Federated Media’s John Battelle; Marissa Mayer, who leads Google’s (GOOG) search services and consumer products like Chrome; and Huffington Post CEO Eric Hippeau. Arthur Sulzberger Jr., publisher of the New York Times (NYT), and The Wall Street Journal’s top editor, Robert Thomson, stand in for the old guard.

Aggregator sites like Huffington Post and online portals like Yahoo (YHOO) and Google have seen their readership, advertising revenue and influence increase. Meanwhile, traditional-media types have criticized these forces for unfairly leeching their reporting and hurting their business models. We’ll be alert for verbal sparring.

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The service is laying off the majority of its employees, and CEO Mike Volpi (pictured right) is out, replaced by Matt Zelesko, who had been SVP of engineering. The Joost.com portal site will stay open, but best to think of it as an ad for the company’s hosting and distribution services, which it will try to sell to cable companies and the like.

A Joost spokesperson declined to say how deep the layoffs will be; but I’m told that the company, which had more than 100 employees last fall, will be down to a couple dozen after the cuts are done. In a post on Joost’s Web site, Volpi said the company “will say goodbye to many of our colleagues and friends.”

This isn’t a shock: Joost’s fate has been the subject of whisper and rumors for the last year or more. The service made an initial splash in 2007 by raising $45 million from the founders of Skype and an array of high-profile investors and media companies, including Sequoia Capital and Viacom (VIA), and was initially supposed to deliver copyrighted content via a peer-to-peer distribution system and a player that users downloaded to their desktops.

But YouTube, and later Hulu, conditioned users to watch video via their browsers, and Joost’s software never caught on. By last fall, the company had retooled and began offering video via the browser like everyone else, but it has never been able to generate a significant audience. In November, a month after the company launched its Web browser, it said it was attracting 2.1 million unique users world-wide, a fraction of YouTube’s audience, and well behind rivals like Hulu, MetaCafe, Veoh and DailyMotion.

Here’s the service’s unique visitor count, per Comscore (SCOR); Joost’s unique viewer count, which is the more relevant metric for video sites, is considerably smaller (click to enlarge):

Joost has been a frequent candidate for buyout rumors, and the company hasn’t gone out of its way to deny them. The supposed buyers would be cable companies like Comcast (CMCSA) Time Warner Cable (TWC) or telcos like AT&T (T) and Verizon (VZ), which would presumably use Joost’s technical team to help build out their own Web video plays.

But some of the cable guys and telcos insist that they’re fine with the people they have. And if they do want to buy a video player, they have plenty of options: Just about all of Joost’s peers have been on the block, formally or informally, for the past few months.

JOOST TO PROVIDE WHITE LABEL ONLINE VIDEO PLATFORM

NEW YORK AND LONDON – June 30, 2009 – Joost, the online video startup, announced today that, along with Joost.com, it will focus on providing white label online video platforms for media companies, including cable and satellite providers, broadcasters and video aggregators. This technology and service offering will support content owners’ efforts to build comprehensive branded environments online.

Media companies around the world are embracing internet-based video portals as a key path to distribute their premium video, but building a world-class video portal is increasingly difficult and expensive. Joost will focus on this issue and provide the market with a cost-effective, end-to-end solution for media companies to publish video under their own brands.

As a part of this new direction, Joost will reorganize and restructure its business. A core team in New York and London will work on providing these solutions, as well as operating and supporting Joost.com and its associated video applications. Joost also will wind down operations in its Leiden development center.

Matt Zelesko, currently SVP of Engineering at Joost, will take over as CEO while continuing to lead the engineering organization. Stacey Seltzer, currently SVP of international business development and content acquisition at Joost, will run the business operations. Mike Volpi has stepped down as CEO of Joost but will remain actively involved as Chairman of the Board.

Joost plans to make its white label video platform commercially available to media companies around the world. This offering will provide a solution for companies looking to build a branded experience for their content on their own site as well as other sites and platforms in their distribution networks.

Time for some image repair, don’t you think?

The AP is trying to do this at this very moment by distributing an 11-point FAQ that attempts to clarify exactly what it’s thinking. But that document is still a little vague and overly formal. Good thing I got on the phone yesterday with the pleasant Jim Kennedy, who oversees strategic planning for the AP and who speaks in clear, concise English.

Much of what we talked about was a rehash of what we talked about Monday afternoon, when AP Chairman Dean Singleton first riled everyone up with his “mad as hell” speech. But given the rampant confusion of the past few days, I thought it was worth going over again. Some excerpts from our chat:

On the AP’s plans to chase down people who “misappropriate” its content: Kennedy stresses that the news organization isn’t planning on creating a Wall Street Journal-style pay wall around its content. And it’s not concerned about bloggers who link to its stories. His beef is with sites that are reprinting AP’s stories on a regular basis without paying for them. “The activity that we’re trying to limit is the systematic harvesting of news without trying to license it,” he says. “The people who are building a business by taking the content and trying to recreate a news report. That’s what we’re trying to address. We’ve had success doing this.”

On the AP’s plan to promote its work more effectively. This has been construed in some quarters as a plan to create a search engine or news portal. But it’s really just an attempt to upgrade the AP’s search engine optimization strategy–that is, trying to get its stuff to show up higher on Google’s (GOOG) search results. It will do that via “search pages,” or “topic pages,” which are par for the course in the Web world. Check out this New York Times (NYT) page on Somali pirates, or this Huffington Post page on newspapers, and you’ll get an idea of where the AP is going.

If the search page plan works, the pages will be generating plenty of page views when people land on them, and it’s possible that the AP will sell ads on that inventory, Kennedy says. But their real function is to shuttle searchers to the original source material from the AP’s members.

On the AP’s beef with Google: It’s real. But many of the stories published this week conflated the AP’s gripe-essentially, that it’s not getting paid enough by the search engine for the use of its content–with its saber-rattling against aggregators who aren’t paying the AP at all. The AP may indeed end up suing people in the latter group. But it plans on resolving its Google problem with a new contract that will replace the one that expires this year.

Kennedy is vague when it comes to specifics about the Google contract and what he’d like changed: “It’s just a reevaluation of the situation,” he says. But he’s clear that the company intends to keep working with the world’s largest Web site. “When we’re talking about Google, we’re talking about our future business relationship,” he says. “When we’re talking about misappropriation, we’re talking about people who have never contemplated a business relationship with us.”

On the confusing message that the AP presented to the world this week: Guilty as charged, says Kennedy. But he argues that his group has indeed given some thought to what it’s doing, even if it hasn’t communicated that clearly to date. “The future is going to be a lot different than the present and the past on the Internet, and we’re trying to get ready for that process,” he says. “To the untrained eye it looks like we’re stupid. But we’re looking forward to a totally new space where we have to get ready to do things in a totally different way. We’re trying to be smart business people and we’re trying to stay in business.”