By the same logic, you might as well not buy a printing press until you have enough subscribers to justify it…

(I don’t know how much of this my area’s paper is still doing, I don’t visit their site much anymore)

Local news web sites don’t give me anything I crave.

Most of the “news” found there are just AP stories recycled. I read those somewhere else already. (Via blogs I like pointing to other sources…)

The weather I get from weather.com. Or I look outside.

The local stories are run from a dry, rules-driven, committeed template – i.e, they all sound the same. “Des Moines man drowns at Gray’s Lake.”

Ads? No way. I go to Craigslist.

Cartoons? They’re rarely funny. Political cartoons? They’re rarely insightful.

In short, there’s no compelling reason to return again and again. There are no tools there to make me more successful. There’s no entertainment value to keep me interested. There’s no community to make me feel like I belong.

Occasionally, there is a local story in which I’m interested that I can’t get anywhere else. But I never hear about it first from the local news site, and finding the story there is not always straightforward.

Here’s what I would do: find the clearest opinionated writers you can find, and turn them loose on either local or national stories. Make it about well-performed debate that informs me through the discussion. Have them interact with each other.

Local news sites think they do that today, but it’s just one-hand clapping for it heavy leftist emphasis. Yawn.

Show me the debate in the editorial room. Celebrate diversity and have conservatives, liberals, libertarians, socialists… throw all of them in the mix.

Have this clear-writing crew read/link/comment with every local blogger. It’s about finding/engaging/attracting passionate users who will reciprocate. By golly, what if the local news site pointed to me occasionally?

Have the clear-writing crew ditch the stupid news templates and write from the heart. Have them focus on telling a story. Give me passion.

Make search so simple and comprehensive that I can easily find what I need.

But that will never happen. Too much change. It breaks the rules.

I could be wrong, but you know what? Shake it up and find out.

Pivoting off Confiteor’s point, no successful entrepreneur worries about that chicken-egg thing. Entrepreneurs aren’t afraid to risk. That’s how you learn about the market and find a solution. Maybe news sites aren’t entrepreneurial. If so, then they won’t be in business long.

But let’s not ignore the effects of boringness and stodginess! After all, you’ll notice that what I have bookmarked are the blogs, not the sections themselves.

I’m waiting for the first paper to blow itself up into a bunch of little media sites instead of still trying to give the 1910 morning paper experience online. In 20 years, the idea of organizing your content according to those rules will seem deeply bizarre to the average web user who never touched a paper paper and sees no reason why all these things are connected in this particular way.

That being said, I have to wonder how easy is for the powers-that-be at local media outlets to make the changes necessary to make their sites worth going to.

Web designers are a dime a dozen, but *good* web designers are hard to come by. Moreover, if I’m running a paper (or a local TV news department), I don’t necessarily have the resources at hand to overhaul my website. Would I even know where to turn? My bet is these folks turn to the marketing department, and thus you end up with a craptacular site.

I think it’s pretty easy for those of us in the technology/web-development business to say “Make your site better, or you’re going to die.” It’s *how* a newspaper goes about doing it that is the challenge/problem, no?