Say you work at a newspaper whose circulation is larger than 300,000 … big enough that it needs to cover major regional stories and localize national ones. A paper this size is just big enough that it needs to devote people and money to the “Big” stories and can’t trouble itself with sending reporters to every sewer commission meeting.
Chances are this paper’s going to have a potentially huge suburban readership made up of educated, somewhat monied people coveted by advertisers. These people have no reason to read the paper, though, because there’s never any news about the burbs in it.
Most of us newsies identify with the stuff that happens in cities — crime, corruption, politics, elite culture — so that’s the kind of stuff we end up covering. But our greatest wellspring of potential readers has moved to the burbs to get away from all that. Nobody has figured out how to cover the suburbs because in our minds no news ever happens there. But here’s the problem: even if we do uncover the secrets to covering the burbs, we have a fresh challenge: how do we cover all those “big” stories while satisfying the news requirements of a sprawling suburban audience? Our paper might never be profitable enough to pay enough reporters and editors to do all that.
This is where blogging can save us — if we’re patient and play it right. We could set up local blogs and solicit volunteers to run them. We provide the templates and the encouragement, and people start doing their own reporting via the blog and its comments. If it’s done right, little communities will spring up around these blogs, and we reward the bloggers with coupons, free subscriptions to the paper and other freebies like coffee cups and T-shirts.
Up until now news has been a one-way business: we report, you consume. It’s been this way because of the limits of available technology. We’d have loved to put more reader feedback in the paper, but it’s just not cost-effective because of all the editors and press people and everybody else required to get words onto a printed page. The Web and blogging tools make that one-way model obsolete.
Imagine if people could go to their local news blog and report on traffic accidents they’ve seen in their neighborhood: everybody who drives by wonders what happened — the witnesses can tell what they saw. Once people become familiar with the notion that they can report news events at the newspaper’s blog without having to beg an editor to send a reporter to cover the story, all kinds of fresh opportunties start to crop up.
We’re living at the dawn of this new two-way approach to news and we’re only dimly aware of how to exploit it. But we have to, or somebody else will beat us to it, and all those suburbs with their SUVs and soccer moms will remain beyond the reach of those advertisers who pay our salaries.