Matthew Petro

Local newspaper=local aggregator?

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I’m pretty sure enough has been written about the state of local newspapers to fill the Library of Congress. Everyone’s either bemoaning the loss of the hometown paper or they’re bitching about its problems and wishing it would hurry up and die like an annoying old relative. So, I figured I might as well throw some words into the pile myself.

I was reading Stacy Holmstedt’s blog post about The Case for Newspapers (or formal city news orgs, at least) and it started me thinking about local news organizations. With so much user-generated content being created now, newspapers are hard pressed to generate anything that someone else hasn’t already covered in a local blog. So how do newspapers avoid becoming simply aggregators for content generated by others?

The easy answer is that they offer something blogs don’t: content generated by trained journalists who know how to research a story, interview sources and support their work with facts. But is that enough? All bloggers aren’t necessarily untrained douchebags who spout unsupported opinions which they try to pass off as real journalism. In fact, many trained journalists are turning towards social media, instead of staying within traditional media (examples: Tony Arranaga and Jenn Burgess). So how bad would it be if newspapers changed their model to be aggregators? Journalists could publish high-quality content via blogs and news outlets could pay to include the content in their daily news feed. The feed could be distributed via any medium (printed newspaper, web site, RSS feed, TV broadcast). Essentially, local news outlets would move from having large in-house staffs to working with many individual contractors.

I fully acknowledge that I’m a news organization outsider, but that’s my take as a news consumer.