Earlier this month, I compiled a list of local news organizations and their apps; add another one to the list — The Uptake, the pro-am video site that received national acclaim for their 2008 U.S. Senate recount coverage. The Uptake's iPhone, Android and Blackberry apps are here, and their mobile website is m.theuptake.org.

Pioneer Press tech correspondent Julio Ojeda-Zapata's judgment?

I can't say the UpTake apps are terribly compelling in its current form, but features now on the drawing board could very well make for killer news apps.

The UpTake, which emphasizes video coverage of political events, allows playback of its latest news uploads from within its new apps. That's great, but live streaming video would be better (apps like Leo Laporte's TWiT app offer this). That is coming, UpTake head honcho Jason Barnett assures me.

Julio and I agree most news apps aren't must haves; he asked me what I thought a killer local-news app should include. Here's his distillation of my ramblings:

• An aggressive, comprehensive blend of hard-news content and entertainment fodder (including events listings)
• News aggregation, meaning it would pull in news content from sources other than its own for a Google Reader-like one-stop-shopping experience
• Graphical and typographical elegance with great attention to detail, which far too many slapped-together apps lack
• Geolocation awareness

I'm certainly no strategist or programmer, just a power user.

A few more thoughts about local-news aggregation:

When it comes to assembling news from other sources, Julio and I use Google Reader and Twitter. He also likes the Reeder app (not affiliated with Google, though it relies on Google Reader); I'm not as enamored because Google Reader will reformat a non-mobile web page into a stripped-down mobile-friendly version. (For the most part, the formatting is fine.)

While Reeder is a faster way to read headlines, Google Reader is faster if you want to read stories.

When I'm talking about local news operations incorporating aggregation in their apps, I'm thinking strictly local news. For example, I expect the Strib to roll out something fancier in the next year, and it would be great if they pushed all interesting Twin Cities news my way, not just their own.

In my fantasy world, this app would allow me to segregate a news org's proprietary news from everyone else's, although I could also have it in one big stream. I have no idea how aggregation would be done — human curated, a la bring.mn, or with an algorithm. For now, I create my own local-news search terms, create RSS feeds for the searches, and they show up in Google Reader on my phone.