Robinson Communications and The West Seattle Herald announce a new iPhone app that goes beyond the headlines. Developed by Sachmanya LLC in Santa Clara, California, the mobile news app presents the most recent local news as posted on WestSeattleHerald.com but also provides direct access to the Herald's Flickr Photo Gallery and the Herald's YouTube videos.

What makes the app truly unique however is its ability to capture news events with your mobile device to submit for publication through the app itself. Utilizing a service called 360 News registered users can submit photos, videos, and local stories to the Herald for publication. Submissions are reviewed and then posted on the site but may also appear on CNN iReport, YouTube, Flickr Twitter and 360 News. Users can see where 360News posts come from on a map and engage with other community members.

The app even includes "push" functionality that the user can opt in for to get stories delivered to their handset as they are posted.

Sachmanya LLC created the app using a tool they built called Yapper (which is an acronym for Your App Maker). The tool recently won "Best of Show" at the 2010 Macworld show. The company is owned by Chirantu Parikh, former head of mobile advertising for search giant Yahoo.com.

"We've been pioneers since the 1950's," said Patrick Robinson, Herald Web Editor for Robinson Communications. "We were the first to bring a web offset press west of the Mississippi in 1958, among the first to use FAX machines in the 70's, in the vanguard of users of Optical Character Recognition systems for print production and the first to have an all digital video production facility in the mid 1980's."

The company is driven by innovation.

"The next logical step for local news is to build an affordable, engaging and surprisingly full featured mobile app like this on Yapper."

To download the free West Seattle Herald application for iPhone go to: http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/west-seattle-herald/id380378271?mt=8 For Android, go to Android Market on your handset and search " West Seattle Herald ".