Cynthia McCune's Library tagged steveouting →  View Popular

Newspapers' local content is not as important as it once was, or as newspaper executives still believe it to be. The demise of some newspapers (Rocky Mountain News, Tucson (Ariz.) Citizen, Seattle Post-Intelligencer, for example) and the degraded quality of many others due to severe cuts and layoffs has opened up opportunities for a wave of fledgling replacement news providers, both for- and non-profit. Generally they are small and/or target niches, but they're getting better and some are growing to represent a looming threat to local newspapers by offering up similar or the same coverage for free.

The move to hide locally produced content behind a pay wall gives new hope to other competitors, including local TV stations. If the biggest newspaper in town is going to shoot itself in the foot, it gives a savvy TV outlet's executives the chance to grab the dominant spot by creating a free news and community Web site that goes well beyond today's typical local-TV sites. It could even use the laid-off newspaper journalists in its market -- a talent pool looking for something else to do -- to accomplish this, probably at bargain rates.

Yet another model is to sell a custom news phone app rather than give it away.

ideas for what to offer to a newspaper's paid members:

learn to sell something else to support the journalism.

the newspaper industry overall has proven itself mostly unable to handle a bad recession and the challenges of adapting to the digital revolution.

Craigslist’s ability to bring people together is something that newspapers don’t do well at in the digital age.

If newspapers are to pull out of their crisis — indeed, if they are to survive long term — they need to learn to take better advantage of the ability of the Internet and mobile devices to introduce people with common interests and bring them together. Alas, most traditional publishers continue to think more about how to make money from the old model of one-to-many, and pay lip service to serving the qualities of the Internet that make it so important to the individuals who live in 2009: its ability to connect people and form communities.

Newspapers still think big; “how can we reach a larger audience with our great content?” They also need to think small; “what can we do to once again be the institution that not only is at the center of our community, but that also facilitates and helps people in our community to create their own connections and communities?”