Local, Local, Local

If there has been an mantra around the newspaper business, its that we "own" the local markets. No one has the news gathering resources that we do, and no one has the sales force that we do. Both are factual statements. And they are still true even after round after round of layoffs.

The question is: does this resource really matter?

My answer is sort of

Certainly on the sales its hard to deny the advantage. Its a huge resource that can be used to cover a great number of businesses. However, effectiveness might be another story. To me, the best sales person is 100% commission, and that commission is based upon the profitability of the deals they sign. If there are special needs or added services that have costs, they should be attributed back to sales.

Sales is rarely organized quite like this. Sales likes a certain element of security when they can get it, and particularly in a difficult industry it would be nearly impossible to sign reps on 100% commission. We've documented the obsession with revenue, so as you might imagine costs are rarely attributed back either. That hurts, but its not that bad in an environment where gross margins are huge.

The content side might be a different story. Again, its not the number of them, but how they are organized. Most newspapers have taken the approach of shutting down distant bureaus, and focusing on the local area. This is an incredible resource for reporting what happens in a particular town. It is an extension of the local, local, local mantra.

The issue is readers don't typically care only about their local area. The wall street meltdown likely has as much relevance to a person in Wichita as New York City. If your people are only in Wichita, you won't have the proper angle on the story. The correction has been to localize the story, by editing it, but this doesn't really change the perspective. It only changes the feel of the article.

What matters most to people are the things that affect them. Money, jobs, fun, sex, friends, products, safety. Crime matters if it affects someones safety, or perceived safety. Not all of these only happen locally.

Local stories are usually "smaller" stories. They almost always affect less people than a national one. If it affects less people there will be less interest.

Less interest is just fine if you are getting the right people. It's the basic principle of segmentation applied to content. I don't care if only 1000 people want to read a review of a local restaurant, just so those people like my content best and keep coming back for more.

However, here's the hard part. A newspaper has become a collection of local stories that don't generate much interest individually. The national stories have been outsourced to AP and other aggregators. The paper then builds up a collection of these stories until every segment has something of interest. On an average day, I'd be hard pressed to find a decent sized local paper in America that didn't produce a story of interest to each one of their readers. The problem is that if you bought the paper, you bought all of the stories. The fact that you only found two interesting articles is fine. Some one else found two different articles, etc...

This feeds the first problem identified in the previous post. If I only read one or two articles, I don't need to spend too much time reading. I can finish my local paper in less than 30 minutes. The stories that I don't read are wasted, but that's OK because its very likely that other groups have found something of interest.

Increasingly the stories that I find of interest are sourced from AP or other wire services. I may be particularly cosmopolitan, but this is a major problem. The true local implications are lost. In Houston, regulations that change energy policy are a huge deal. In the midwest, farming subsidies might be vital. However, the AP tends to write with the only the national perspective rather than the local one. Why you should care if you live in the midwest, but aren't a farmer is usually omitted.

In order for this endeavor to succeed, the effort has to be made to explain how the national and international affects the local. The analysis is the hard work, and its the part that is most likely to be left out. For that matter, the same could be said of the local coverage. Analysis is the key. Certainly a grisly accident can occur, and will likely get coverage, but the greater question is what can be done to prevent future occurrences. Is the situation one that has occurred in the past, or is this merely a random event highly unlikely to recur?

My proposition would be to create a team of news analysts. Their job is not to gather the facts, but to comment on why it matters. Not from a position of bias as an editoralist might, but from the perspective of data. If bias cannot be eliminated, then some potential sides should be presented. They aren't columnists, nor are they editors. Its a new role that can even comment on the wire copy.

My concern is: in many ways this is a role that bloggers have taken as they comment on the mainstream media.