A Strategy for Saving Our Hometown Newspapers

I am an enthusiast about all newspapers, both those with a national reputation such as the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal as well as my local paper -- the Ann Arbor News. The latter is, unfortunately, beginning to circle the drain like many others of its kind. I have read the comments by journalists and other experts about how to save our hometown newspapers. Many of these critiques have stuck me as inadequate, irrelevant, or self-serving. That was the case until I read a blog note by Dana Blankenhorn entitled: Ending the Paper. Here is an excerpt from his note with boldface emphasis mine:

The newspapers decided long ago that they would only organize their own advertisers and their own readers, thank you, that the rest of the market was too much work for them. So they slowly circled the drain and now they're going in. Good. The opportunity, however, remains open. A company with the technical chops to build a good online city directory, to give every shop and individual in that city their own page, to populate the pages of non-advertisers with links to whatever is out there on them (including maps), and only after building community to build traffic and business for those who will pay can still make money. Google could do this through local editions. So, too, could Yahoo or Microsoft. The existing directory players could have, but like the newspaper people declined because they didn't know what their business was. You build advocacy on top of organization, not underneath it. If you're not providing organization you can't provide context. An online newspaper that isn't building a directory is no better than a blog. And not very different.

What a great idea! This is the first suggestion for saving our newspapers that has really made sense to me. They should seek to copy the business model of our telephone directories of the past and present but using a digital format on steroids. The foundation of this new info-structure for our "local newspapers" should be a comprehensive, on-line directory listing all businesses and organizations in the community and, ideally, the names of all of the residents. Layered on top of this, taking advantage of the advertising model as the source of revenue, will be ads from the local business promoting current sales and services. Readers can click on any of these advertisements to generate a Google Map for directions to the business. Layered on top of this will be fresh news about current events like movies, sports, and concerts. This news content layer can also be positioned to go "hyperlocal" with syndicated features from, say, the New York Times about, say, ecological issues with links to the local organizations and individuals with a special interest in the environment. Food and recipe stories could link to local restaurants that feature similar menus. You get the idea. As Blankenhorn says above: You build advocacy on top of organization, not underneath it.

My disagreement with the prescriptive measures advocated by journalists and their editors is that thy have been trying to recreate their failing paper publications of the present rather than a new type of more comprehensive media based an understanding of the capabilities of digital technology.