Robert Niles writes at OJR about the five beats he’d create were he starting a local news site:
- Food
- Education
- Labor
- Business
- Faith
He also stipulates that this imaginary site would have zero wire copy or syndicated material and be totally locally produced and aimed at the community. If sports is the crack of local papers, wire copy is the meth and syndicated content is the heroin. They are eating up resources that could be better used elsewhere.
He also gives reasons he didn’t include sports, entertainment, weather, crime and courts, comics, and government in his list. He’d limit sports to the truly local (outside niche plays around local sports of wider interest), outsource entertainment, crowdsource weather, automate crime and courts, kill the comics and cover government in ways other than horse race journalism. (Health gets the sports treatment in an update.)
It’s hard to argue with his choices and his exclusions. Far too much of the limited amount of money newspapers have is thrown at “what we’ve always done”. I’d add government back in, covered in an intelligent way relevant to the community served.
