Huh? The internet wasn’t a choice made by anyone associated with newspapers.

Okay, but here’s the key example. Does a paper in Chicago need its own movie reviewer? Not really. Chicago is hardly central to the film industry even if a few big movies are shot there each year.

Now, does that mean the Chicago Sun-Times might as well dump Roger Ebert? That he brings them no value they couldn’t get with syndicated reviews– or no reviews at all?

The individual voice who draws attention is every bit as great an asset as a focus on local, is my point. It’s not easy to find those stars, but when you have them, don’t lose them.

And what about those who steered the newspapers into menacing seas?

Reporting over opinion is one of those false choices. A good local editorial writer or columnist has to report to make themselves worth reading. There’s a lot of no-reporting pontification with national issues, a lot less on local.

If a newspaper has local opinion people who don’t report, they should ditch them regardless of the latest change in profit margins.

That said, the online, the distinction between news and opinion is disappearing. News people don’t often adapt very well to dropping the no bias pretense and so much of the new stuff takes at least a large element of opinion sensibility.

Good link journalism benefits from opinion. Going into comments and responding to your readers requires opinion. A good breaking news blog requires edging closer to opinion.

When newspapers play to their local strength, they’ve got to keep the local opinion. Look at the top stories at most newspapers over any week and you are going to see plenty of local opinion. If you have access to really good stats and you divide the readership numbers by the FTEs it takes to generate that readership, opinion is among the most popular local news.

Also, the ‘aggregators’ are proving very adept at creating custom local content, and even more importantly, the aggregators are far better at coopting local ad dollars. Why put a classified ad in a local online publication (or print product) when you can place it in Craigslist or Google, etc.?

Media will never be the same, and newspapers are not going to solve their challenges by going online.

Looking for your comments on the speech Rupert Murdoch gave that was published today: http://www.news.com.au/heraldsun/story/0,21985,24640951-5018380,00.html

Mike G,
I’m not sure that a local food (as opposed to restaurant) writer is more valuable than a local reporter. I do think that there are opportunities – a la the Star-Ledger’s Pharmalot – to create products that have national and even international appeal but llikely as separate products and even businesses. The point is that given spare resources and the need to focus and maximize value, I do assume that a local newspaper needs to be local.

Dave,
I don’t know. I think I’d still push for reporting over opinion.

Jersey,
Who needs editors when I have you. Thanks.

And one of those strategies should be developing name brand talents in a host of different interest areas. Indeed one future one could see for newspapers is that they no longer expect people to read The Bayhorn Bugle at all any more– but they build an audience out of the X number of readers that a sports writer gets, and the X number of readers that a food critic gets, and so on through every niche interest that can attract a certain number of readers. Instead of grabbing a mass audience and giving it many columnists to read, it catches readers through all those personalities’ individual efforts, and then cross-promotes the others and makes a little ad money off each one.

Yeah, movie reviews are beyond generic and classical music is too elitist to make money in a local niche. High quality local opinion is critical to engaging the local online world and learning to interact with the local blogosphere. Getting rid of them is foolish, especially if they are still wasting a dime on national syndicated columnists who are also generic.

http://tehipitetom.blogspot.com/2008/11/one-hundred-years-of-if-stone.html

Check your spelling: it’s Ludwig van Beethoven. That’s something the classical music critic wouldn’t get wrong, for starters!

http://tehipitetom.blogspot.com/2008/11/one-hundred-years-of-if-stone.html

She parallels Stone’s way of working to modern bloggers.

Up to a point – there’s nothing especially local in reporting back that the new Tom Cruise film has been shot to make him look taller.

But that’s not to say that local paper movie coverage has to be generic – just that the value for a local news organisation might sit somewhere other than in providing times and summaries for the multiplex. Towns and cities have a film culture that exists beyond the popcorn-and-hotdog circuit, and that’s something worth reporting on. It might not be a full-time post, but if you can fund a movie critic who works the local art-house beat, the film societies, the college societies. They’d probably welcome coverage, it adds value and sense of local to the newspaper product that running a Parade interview with Jennifer Aniston never will – it might even be possible to persuade some of these groups to share their marketing budgets with the paper in return for the paper supporting and reporting what they’re doing. That, surely, has to be two thumbs up?