Led by CEO Darian Shirazi, 23, whose nascent career has already seen the launch of multiple startups and a stint at Facebook, Fwix signed a recent deal to provide aggregated local news for the New York Times Company (NYT). Fwix, founded in October 2008, sorts through about 200,000 pieces of news every day, analyzing and filtering stories from tens of thousands of local sources.

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The investment, whose size the Time Warner Inc. Web site declined to disclose, comes as news organizations seek more local information about high school sports, eateries and social events, in which they see an untapped market. Outside.In and a growing cadre of start-ups either hire people to write neighborhood news, or collect and organize dispatches from local citizens, news outlets or bloggers.

MSNBC.com, a joint venture of NBC Universal and Microsoft Corp. (MSFT), this summer acquired EveryBlock, which feeds crime reports, restaurant health inspections and other data to news organizations’ Web sites. AOL Inc. recently acquired the local-news network Patch.

CNN.com, which is part of Time Warner’s (TWX) Turner Broadcasting, plans to carry the Outside.In dispatches on its own Web site—the biggest push into local news so far by one of the most popular national news outlets in the country.

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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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OK. But exactly how much less?

I’ve been asking Mark Josephson that question for months, and now he has an answer. Josephson, the CEO of local news platform Outside.in, figures the local, online-only newspaper of tomorrow, for a decent-sized city, will have a staff of 20 people. That’s 20 people, period. Perhaps six of them will be “news gatherers.”

Josephson was kind enough to model his future newspaper in a spreadsheet for me, and I’ll get to that in a minute.

But first, the context. Josephson’s opinion is worth noting because his company is supposed to play a role in creating said future newspaper/news site.

The pitch: Outside.in wants to help local news sites by supplying them with a river of extra content created by local bloggers, Twitterers and lots of people who don’t even think of themselves as content creators, like people who post real estate listings. The local site is supposed to aggregate and filter the stuff and sell ads on it. The people supplying the content get more exposure via links from the bigger site.

The three-year-old company has just rolled out a new tool that’s supposed to make all of this easier for local publishers, which could be a newspaper site but doesn’t have to be. For instance, the company has tested its “Outside.in for Publishers” offering with sites run by local TV stations. You can read more about it here.

Now back to Josephson’s news site of the future: He imagines that the tiny editorial staff of the model newspaper produces an extraordinary number of page views–40 million per month, in this example–and then augments it with twice as many page views from a third-party network (which could be, but doesn’t have to be, supplied by Outside.in).

A sales force of a dozen people sells ads for both buckets of inventory, and uses ad networks to fill in remnant space they don’t sell. Net result: A very healthy 43 percent operating margin, much better than the 27 percent margins the newspaper industry enjoyed from 2000 through 2007, before the business imploded.

Here’s what the math looks like: I’ve broken up the P&L into three sections, and clicking on each of them will enlarge the image. Or you can view the whole thing as  a Google document here.

Josephson stresses that his model is a starting point, and he’s happy to tweak any of the inputs.

If you think his assumptions about ad rates are too aggressive (and some local publishers I’ve talked have given me that feedback), you could knock them down. Same thing with page view goals. Or if you decided you wanted to run the business at break-even instead of trying to make a profit, you could do that too, and see how many more people you could afford to hire.

But no matter how you fiddle with the numbers, there’s no way that Josephson’s model gets you anywhere close to old newspaper staffing levels, whereby a paper like the Seattle Post-Intelligencer employed 150 people on the editorial side alone.

But those staffing levels don’t work anymore, which is why Hearst shut down the paper and replaced it with the online-only SeattlePI.com, which has a 20-person edit staff, earlier this year.

So Josephson’s numbers really become an ink-blot test: Do you think they spell doom for news sites in the Web age or an optimistic solution that lets them survive? Let me know in comments below.

I’ve also asked Mark Josephson, the CEO of Outside.in, a start-up that’s supposed organize and eventually profit from a proliferation of Web-generated local news, to explain how he’d save the likes of the P.I. He promises to get back to me soon.

Here’s one gambit that won’t work: A PR stunt organized on Facebook.

Some 6,000 people have signed on to support “National Buy a Newspaper Day,” which is supposed to be Feb. 2, and is exactly what it sounds like. The only way this one would work would be if it convinced deep-pocketed philanthropists to buy newspaper companies themselves–you can get a lot of them for very little these days.

But! There is a bit of hope for newspapers. For one thing, they still inspire the passion of people like Chris Freiberg, the 24-year-old reporter at the Daily News-Miner (Fairbanks, Alaska), who is organizing “Buy A Newspaper Day.”

I asked Chris to tell me a bit about himself and why he thought this might work, and his thoughtful and heartfelt response was enough to make me root for him. I’m pretty sure I’ll be reading his work in the future, regardless of the medium.

I recently graduated from Indiana University in 2007 with a degree in journalism. Though I’m still fairly young, I’ve actually done quite a bit in my career already. I started off writing a column for a small Catholic newspaper at the age of 14 and wrote for the Post-Tribune of Northwest Indiana throughout high school. I was the managing editor of the IU paper and have also had two articles published in Hustler magazine because of things that happened at IU (and yes, Hustler does actually print some articles).

My father, who passed away in 2000, started off a newspaperman when he left high school, though he eventually went into radio. My mom is currently a radio talk show host in the Chicago area. Really, it’s no surprise that I decided to pursue some form of journalism, though God knows, my mom tried to discourage me, constantly telling me there was no money in it. But it’s what I love doing and I’m happy.

As for why I started this event, I’ve read in particular the stories about what’s happening at the Seattle Post-Intelligencer and the Chicago Tribune with great concern, that two such well-established newspapers may very well go out of business this year. Obviously though, those are just two of the biggest cases of a greater illness sweeping the industry.

Here in Fairbanks, because of our remoteness and the way the ownership of the paper is set up, we’re actually somewhat insulated from a lot of what happens in the rest of the country, but we’re still feeling some pain with multiple positions not being filled for several months to come. We had a staff meeting about these things last week, about our paper and the status of the industry, and I think one older reporter here put it best when she said that there are probably a lot of bad people out there who would love to see the newspaper industry go belly up.

I mean, there’s always going to be the national media keeping a close eye on what national politicians do, but if local newspapers start dying, who’s going to keep an eye on mayors and city councilmen? I’ve seen it myself that TV reporters ask two questions, get what they need for evening news, and then they’re gone. There’s no depth to their reporting.

That’s not to say that all or even most local politicians are corrupt, but I think it’s important that we have good newspaper reporters there keeping an eye on what goes on in local government, keeping the public well-informed about what’s happening in the community.

Millions of people have dogs to keep them safe, and being a dog owner myself, I know it doesn’t cost much more than 75 cents a day to keep that dog well-fed and happy. Newspapers can be just as effective a watch dog for the entire community, and they don’t require much more than that to survive either.”