The New Local

Are newspaper companies at all ready for prime-time of tablet news-reading world?

One headline: “Salt Lake City paper axes 43% of its staff”. Another: “Deseret News a model of growth and innovation for the entire industry”. One’s a fact; the other is aspirational.

From the Post, Gilbert takes the ability to be two things, simultaneously, a worldwide political news leader and a company plying in the waters of hyperlocal; he believes that in the digital age, you can difference faces for differing audiences. In this case, you can be both a worldwide Mormon vertical — serving a potential readership of six million — and the newspaper of Salt Lake’s and Utah’s smaller communities.

The notion: to put a more intimate face on the problem. Take a look the project of 10 stories, 6 videos and more than 75 photographs, “Invisible Families: The Homeless You Don’t See” and you do get a different kind of appreciation of the issue. The blogs’ postings vary in journalistic quality, and add a grassrootsy dimension to metro paper coverage. A great model for others to test.

Clearly, this model works best, and most easily, in big states like Texas and California. We’d have to believe though that the principles, if not the scale, are widely applicable across the US and in other nations as well

Why couldn’t newspaper companies do what Patch announced — a nationwide network of hyperlocal sites?

“It’s the legacy crap,” one veteran with feet in both camps told me. “Instead of burning it down and starting all over, they just experiment.”

So who’s the ad competition? Maybe we should ask, who isn’t? …The question, here, is one of sustainability. Certainly, there’s the question whether Patch can sustain itself, as its parent AOL struggles to find a new identity and growing business model. Then, there’s the question of the sustainability of hyperlocal journalism already being done from coast to coast. These are true start-ups, often one-man (or -woman) bands, invented by journalists truly passionate about community coverage. Pre-Patch, it’s been the fledgling blog ad-and-distribution network experiments that gave hope that more money could be found to support these ventures. Now, we have to wonder whether Patch — which will link to other sites it finds useful, but won’t network them — will make the sustainability of these more organic, non-templated local blogs more questionable.

Let’s look at the Newsonomics of launching what is the nation’s first combined local online news startup/24-hour news channel.

That combination is the most basic to understanding the business of TBD, informing both TBD’s cost structure and revenue models. If TBD turns profitable within two to three years, it may become a prototype for digital/video/TV city-based news businesses.

That’s the percentage WashingtonPost.com — no shrinking violet in the new battle of D.C. — is up in unique visitors, June, 2010 over June, 2009, according to Nielsen. That positive number is a small feat. Nielsen’s Current News category was down 2.74% overall for the same period.

So we go from macro (“10 Reasons to Watch the TBD Launch,” to micro, as we all get look at the site, and can translate the good theory behind the site to its actual look, feel and execution.