A vision for local news

Several thoughtful and influential people in the local newspaper business are thinking about the following model. It has great potential.

1. Establish a voluntary correspondent in every postcode/village that you want to serve. Give then a business card and agree to pay them a small retainer.
2. Set them up with a blog to which they must post daily, strictly only local and relevant news and views, text, audio and video (no thoughts about Middle East policy). Geotag and subject tag it all.
3. Create one single national website for local news.
4. Let it be completely personalised by the user (many of us have more than one village or locality we would like to keep up with) and as algorithmically intelligent as, say, Amazon
5. Give each voluntary correspondent a good quality A4 colour printer. Pay for the paper and ink.
6. Have small teams of editors in regional HQs who know a bit about their area
7. Produce branded, weekly, free, double sided, single sheet A4 weekly mini-newspapers (like the old FT Digest) for each postcode area
8. Distribute door to door via Royal Mail (if affordable) or volunteers if no.

In print, advertising would be both hyperlocal and national — i.e. networks of demographically targeted postcodes.

On the web, advertising would be 100% user targeted.

Anyone could do this. I do not see necessarily that it will be one of the major established players that does it first.

2 comments January 16th, 2009