newspapers

The badly flawed Shorenstein report arguing that local newspapers are the most seriously threatened by the Internet already has been properly shredded by Jeff Jarvis, but there's another angle that strikes me: sloppy use of the word "local."

I believe that "local" is a powerful asset, not a liability, and that the Shorenstein report has tripped over a lack of precision in the use of that word.

It seems obvious that "regional" is bigger than "local," and "local" is bigger than "hyperlocal." It's not so clear where the lines are.

U.S. newspapers are overwhelmingly "local" (or perhaps more accurately, "regional") in the sense of distribution: of more than 1,400 daily newspapers, only a few are distributed nationwide.

The reasons should be obvious but I'll point them out anyway.

These newspapers evolved in an area of profound geographic isolation. It simply wasn't possible to cover the whole country, or even a major subset of the states, with a single print product distributed in a timely fashion.

While these traditional daily newspapers may have been restricted geographically in their distribution, they were not restricted geographically in their content focus. They developed content-distribution networks (Associated Press and other wires and syndicates). They became powerful tools for people to learn about a broad but distant world. Today's dominant newspaper content model quickly emerged.

As transportation networks evolved, some of those newspapers, particularly those published in larger cities, hopped on board and began distributing regionally, where a region might be part of a state, an entire state, or multiple states.

There was a time when the Kansas City papers were home-delivered over two-thirds of Missouri, when the St. Louis Globe-Democrat was home-delivered throughout Southern Illinois, and when the Minneapolis Tribune was rushed all the way out to the Dakotas every day.

Were such newspapers actually "local?"

Or were they just stand-ins for USA Today, the Wall Street Journal, and the New York Times in an era before we could satfax page images to remote printing plants around the world?

Smaller "local" newspapers never developed such broad distribution networks, but they followed a similar, if scaled-down, content and distribution model.

Now the world has changed, and such newspapers are aggressively cutting back on the geographic reach of their circulation systems.

This began back in the 1990s when I was at the Star Tribune, which using pricing as well as distribution cutbacks to radically trim unprofitable circulation outside the core advertising market. It continues today. The Savannah Morning News, one of my employer's newpapers, recently whacked entire counties from its outlying coverage area, as did the Atlanta Journal and Constitution.

But when it comes to content, many newspapers are struggling with the idea of dropping the nonlocal and refocusing the product.

Even though it's obvious that the local newspaper is an obsolescent tool for nonlocal news coverage, those newspapers are carrying a load of aging subscribers who grew up in the old world. Those "loyal core readers" expect the newspaper to provide a great deal of something that just plain doesn't work for the majority of the market. So these newspapers are faced with some difficult choices.

For the largest "local" newspapers, the problem is even worse: When you strip away the global news and look at what's left, you discover that it's not local at all, not by any definition of local used by common people.

The government definition of a "Metropolitan Statistical Area" provides a tool that is convenient for researchers but ultimately misleads, mashing together an assortment of towns and cities that barely interact.

If it takes two or three hours to drive across a "local" area, it's not local. If you live in Fort Worth, news from Plano is not likely to be even remotely interesting to you, because you wouldn't consider it local. Ditto for Alton, Ill., which is not local to Crystal City, Mo.

Newspapers like the Dallas Morning News, the Chicago Tribune and Sun-Times, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and the Minneapolis Star Tribune are hurting not because they're local, but because they're not local enough. And as they try to figure out how to be local, they're discovering they lack the proper tools. They have the wrong staff, the wrong processes, even the wrong presses.

Smaller newspapers are doing much better. The genuinely local, and even better yet, hyperlocal newspapers -- the ones you can pick up and see your life reflected -- are very strong. So the Shorenstein report's claims about local newspapers are off the mark. Not really being local is the problem.

Bill Densmore and Chris Peck have posed three interesting questions to people who have signed up for the Aug 7-8 "Journalism That Matters" seminar in Washington, and to members of a Facebook group. Here are my answers:

1) How does a community support journalism at a time when traditional newspaper-generated revenue is drying up?

I'm less concerned about journalism at the community level right now than I am about journalism at the national/global level.

AP's in trouble. Its members are either cutting back on AP services or seriously contemplating doing so, as they refocus their newspapers on local journalism.

CNN has gone straight to journalism hell, handing over its airwaves to people like Lou "Buy My Book About the Mexican Peril" Dobbs and Glen "Liberals are Like Hitler" Beck. I have at least five alleged 24-hour news channels on my cable system, yet I have trouble finding any actual news on any of them at any given moment.

NBC seems to be specializing in infotainment about sex perverts. CBS is a wounded duck.

The Internet has made everything just one click away, so we all have equal access to the Economist, NYT, the Guardian, and other resources. But the roster of newsgathering organizations that have the resources and a commitment to quality coverage of global events is rapidly shrinking.

Enough about the global problems.

At the local level, I'm actually optimistic, even though Wal-Mart and other forces are decimating the ranks of local advertisers who support local news. I think there's going to be a blooming of Internet-based locally focused operations that meld news and community conversation effectively.

2) How does journalism survive when digital devices have made centralized printing presses and TV stations all but obsolete?

I think the important thing to recognize is that printing and broadcasting are the "how" and not the "what."

See my blog item from earlier this year:

http://www.yelvington.com/20070105/a_good_enough_replacement_for_journalism

I don't suggest that the role of the professional newsgatherer is obsolete, but it's not the only way to get some of that work done.

3) What is journalism, anyway, in a time when citizens with a cell phone and laptop can tell stories, take photos and be journalists for a day anytime they want?

I respect a definition of journalism that embraces social responsibility, ethical behavior and professional standards of quality including accuracy and completeness.

But we can't draw a bright line between Journalism and journalism and conversation and activism. It is a continuum. (And regarding activism, a few moments of contemplation about the history of American journalism will drive home that point.)

As professionals we have to earn our way every day by creating value that people -- readers, consumers, whatever -- respect. What we now have to do is learn to create that value in an environment in which anyone can, at any moment, step up and play an active role.

While reading coverage of the Minneapolis bridge collapse this morning, I was reminded how, on the Internet, all the world's media resources are just one click away, which is a boon for consumers but creates a difficult environment for producers, who now have to compete with everything at once.

Quite a few comments on the New York Times website were from Minnesotans. "It has been surreal to view images of a place one block away from where I live," wrote one. "My house is about seven blocks from the bridge that collapsed," reported another. "The bridge literally collapsed about two blocks from my apartment. I had gone over the bridge just an hour before it collapsed," wrote a third. Several people posted links to resources on startribune.com.

I drove across that bridge just about every work day for nearly 14 years. There were questions raised about its structural integrity in the early 1990s. I can remember an inspection-and-repair unit that hung off the side of the bridge for months. The bridge is just downstream from a dam that kicks up mist (creating a chronic ice problem in the winter), and like all reinforced concrete structures in Minnesota, it's had problems with road salt that seeps into the concrete and attacks the rebar.

Fortune has a piece on the challenges facing the newspaper business that asks: "Can newspaper publishers turn the Internet from a threat into an opportunity ...? It's a long shot, but it's their only hope. Their plight is something not often seen in business: Newspapers remain important institutions, providing a valuable public service, but their business model is slowly, or maybe not so slowly, going away."

It's a lengthy piece full of facts and sidebar graphics and illustrative anecdotes about the Washington Post, but I can boil it down to one simple truth: If your business model is predicated on scarcity and you're suddenly operating in a world of surplus, you're in deep doo-doo. Time to come up with a Plan B.

The story makes a passing reference to some interesting innovation projects at newspapers: BigLickU, the moms site from Dallas Morning News, Palm Springs Desert Sun's FoodPsycho.com. But instead of looking ahead at what might be, it's mostly a rehash of everything you've seen/heard over the last year.