I’ve been thinking about local news this weekend, mostly because I’m not sure where to find it. Maybe you have this problem, too.
When we lived in the city, there was lots of news for the city. There were several big newspapers and a lot of television stations with news casts. There was a 24 hour news cable station. When something big happened, no matter when it happened, the television crews were quickly there. And you could read about it online, see it on tv, hear it on the radio. This makes sense. People want to know what’s going on, in a city there are a lot of people in total, and advertisers choose to spend their advertising on the shows that are watched (or listened to) by the most people.
Local, or neighbourhood, news was tougher to come by. One neighbourhood we lived in had a really good weekly newspaper which contained a great deal of information about what was going on – or had gone on – in the neighbourhood. The other neighbourhood we lived in didn’t have such a paper.
In the end, the good neighbourhood newspaper was bought up by a conglomerate that bought up all the neighbourhood papers in the city – they ran one paper each week with certain pages allocated to neighbourhood content and the rest containing citywide content. It was a whole lot less useful that way, although I’m sure they saved money by running the same content in all the neighbourhoods. What was left out was the additional neighbourhood detail. It also lost the flair that had characterized the neighbourhood paper – as might be typical, this paper had been run by several committed idealists, and sometimes their take on things was quite entertaining. The conglomerate had a more corporate editorial perspective, so nothing goofy, opinionated or potentially troublemaking ever ran. It was boring. So, we ended up relying on gossip for the really interesting stuff.
Now we no longer live in the city. The closest thing we have to a newspaper is a town paper that was bought up years ago by a national conglomerate of town newspapers. Like the conglomerate in the city, this paper likes to run content nationally that it believes interesting to small-town-dwellers – like advice on starting to compost, or getting your kids back to school – rather than specific local content. It obviously prefers to keep its costs down, so anything that happens outside of Monday to Friday, 9 – 5, isn’t covered until the next publication date. It’s the only paper, so there’s no real competition, which would be what would drive a change in that policy. The local radio station has a similar notion of news – news, unfortunately, does tend to happen in the evenings and on the weekends. So, does extreme weather. But other than from gossip, I can’t figure out where to hear the good stuff.
It seems that there must be enterprising individuals in other communities who perceive this same lack of information. The really neat thing is that we now have the internet and blogs, which are very cheap ways to desseminate information. I would think that a blog with a local news orientation would also attract a lot of regular hits, and thus would be a good location for advertising.
Unfortunately, I don’t have a nose for news or time to take on another project. I really wish someone would do this, though! (Because I am curious!)
What about your community? Do you have ways and means of learning the good stuff?
Deborah Cooke: Author 