Local News Must Become MORE Local


Posted: March 10th, 2009 | By: Steve Mullen | Filed under: Media News | No Comments

Local media is at a crossroads.  Nothing new there, I realize.  But, a new article by Mike Elgan in ComputerWorld goes one step further in saying local news is actually dead.  Here’s a snippet from the article:

Newspapers delude themselves into thinking that readers read nothing else. The assumption is that it’s not news until we cover it. So every newspaper covers the same story, wasting billions of dollars per year in duplicated effort industrywide.

And, for that matter, a related form of bigotry has always driven the whole “local” model for local radio and newspaper coverage. The model is based on pandering where the constantly reinforced message is that local people are better than people who aren’t local, and local businesses, organizations, schools, churches and resources are better, too. Local radio and newspapers take an us vs. them attitude toward the world, and that’s largely the business model.

Now that the Internet has killed “local,” the survival adjustment that radio and newspaper companies must make is to cover local events for a global audience. Radio stations and newspapers must now consider the larger, newer audience, and stop the bigoted pandering. And they must also stop covering the larger world.

While I agree with his premise that the Internet is killing local news, I disagree with his suggestion for a solution — that local news organizations need to stop pandering to the local audience.  I think the solution is the exact opposite.  I think they need to pander MORE.  I’ll give you three examples:

  1. What affects your life more, a budget cut in the Defense Department or a budget cut in your local school system?
  2. What affects your life more, a national report about crumbling infrastructure or a story about how a new stoplight is going to be installed at a problematic intersection near your house.
  3. What affects your life more in the short term, the most recent quarterly earnings of Wal*Mart or the announcement that a new Starbucks is opening in your small town?

I think you probably see my point.  In most cases, local news affects your life more than national news.  And, there’s less competition for local news.  Anyone can hop on the Internet and find the national stories I mentioned above (that is, if I didn’t make them up), but they’re not likely to find much coverage of the local stories beyond their local news organizations.  This type of story is what local news organizations need to cover to survive.  Despite this, if I tune in to my local TV or radio station, or open my local daily newspaper, I see large portions of their “news hole” committed to national stories.  This is particularly problematic in the case of the daily newspaper, because the news I’m reading was actually printed the night before … and I know I can get a more up-to-date version online.

There are a miriad of changes that need to come to local news organizations if they want to survive, and you can add to the list “the need to become hyper-local”.  It’s an old business mantra — do what no one else is doing, and do it well.

Hat tip to Podcasting News for alerting me to this story.

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