The idea for Evening Edition sprang from a July 9 tweet from former NYTimes.com design director Khoi Vinh: "iPad suggests 'evening newspaper' habits; tablet owners consumer more news than those who don't own tablets."

The web designers at Mule Design took that idea and ran with it. Just one week later Evening Edition launched-- with Paz on board as editor, and sponsorship from Mother Jones. And no ads.

Evening Edition is devastatingly simple: An experienced editor, Anna Rascouët-Paz, sorts through the day's news and assembles a single page of news: six or so important stories spanning a wide range of topics, published on the web every day at 5 p.m. The design is clean, easy on the eyes, and loads quickly and well on a tablet or cell phone browser -- no need to download an app, no sifting through voluminous bundles of stories under section heads. Links to the original stories are included, so readers who want more can get more easily.

This is truly a curation effort, not mere aggregation. ReadWriteWeb notedthat Paz "often combines several sources into a concise summary. It draws on other people's reporting, like just about all of what passes as news these days -- but Evening Edition performs a critical journalistic function that often falls by the wayside online: It elevates the significant information above the noise."

And that's a significant bonus, since (as GigaOm's Mathew Ingram observed):

"Sifting through vast quantities of information in order to show people the important stuff is what newspapers are supposed to do, but many newspaper websites and even mobile apps still shovel an enormous amount of content at users with very little filtering. ...Why do they do this? Because they have hundreds of reporters and editors whose job it is to pump out thousands of articles a day for the print edition, and the website gets all of that and more.

"It's a supply-oriented approach to information, rather than a demand-oriented one. In effect, a newspaper website says to a reader: 'Here's all the things we came up with today, which you may or may not be interested in.' Something like Evening Edition, however, says: 'We know that you are busy, and overwhelmed with information, and we want to help you -- here's what you need to know.'"

This is a great idea, and the best part about it is this is not rocket science.

Any news publisher or editor could emulate this approach to launch a curated and highly relevant digital news product. In fact, community and niche news publishers might be in an especially good position to use this strategy to add value to readers and engage audiences daily via mobile devices.

Consider this: Community news editors constantly peruse a variety of news and information, and glean from that relevance to the communities they serve. They also have a strong sense of what matters or is most important to their communities -- and often they also have a strong historical perspective on their community.

A community news site could launch its own "evening edition" -- which might be a separate website, or a section of its current site. The design would be clean and spare, emulating Mule Design's Evening Edition. The handful (three to six?) stories curated there could be a mix of the publisher's own top stories, as well as top stories from other news venues (say, the nearest metro daily paper or network TV news affiliate) or other resources (state or local governments, local school systems or institutions, blogs, nonprofits, etc.). The editor could also add insight and context, highlighting the direct relevance to the community.

For instance, a community site in California might mention and link to the Oakland Tribune's coverage of Pacific Gas & Electric's new solar plans-- and relate it to nearby solar projects. The community news publisher's main site might not have a specific story on this -- and might not even run one -- but by putting this issue on the community radar, that publisher is offering a service based on context and convenience.

Who's going to pay for this? I think Evening Edition is on the right track that ads would be a bad mix for this aesthetically spare service -- but sponsorship might be an option. It's a discrete project that could gain prime-time local popularity, and thus might be an attractive sponsorship offering for local businesses, foundations, or other organizations.

Since this publishing strategy relies on the web, rather than apps, to deliver a good mobile experience, that makes is less costly and technically simpler to implement. It could also be supplemented with an e-mail edition that would be pushed out at the same time the web edition goes live.

It'll be interesting to see Evening Edition evolve. But for now, it's an interesting option not just for the national and global news of the day, but for smaller more focused news audiences.

The News Leadership 3.0 blog is made possible by a grant to USC Annenberg from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.