When I visit PressDemocrat.com, I go for one thing: Sonoma County news. Someone in Mendocino County might visit the site for Mendo County news, which is great, but not the reason I visit. Ok, with that said, how do I locate Sonoma County news on PressDemocrat.com. Ahh… herein lies the problem. Local news granularity is sorely missing on the site.

When scrolling down PressDemocrat.com’s frontpage, you won’t find sections for “Santa Rosa news” or “Windsor news”

When I worked at the Winston-Salem newspaper, we had sections for each of the counties we covered, and I’m pretty sure we had feeds for each of them. One of our managers suggested getting rid of them — the traffic wasn’t particularly high to any one of the sections…. however, if you added the traffic to all of the county-based sections together, it was traffic worth considering.

And if you like that anecdote, I’ve got another. Denver’s Rocky Mountain News, despite their “Closer To Home” slogan and (some say) general reputation for being more focused on the local, has no place-based online sections or place-based RSS feeds. The Denver Post, my employer, has both. The Post had place-based RSS feeds for the Denver Metro area before I started working there in October 2006.

I don’t get it — you’re a local news organization, you publish most of your information about a specific place on this planet, yet you do nothing to highlight, filter, or organize your place-based information? These city- / county- / neighborhood- / street- / block-based news feeds are just the tip of the location-based information iceberg. What can you do with a dateline? With a locator map? With a photo? A crime blotter? A classified ad? A banner ad? A calendar entry?

I wrote about some of this at the beginning of 2008 in this blog post, Three ways that online changes the “Where?” question, journalistically. I’m working on answers in my day-job, some of the time. If you’ve got ideas for a non-day-job project related to this, let me know.

1. Free our data: Plenty of ideas for freeing government data
2. Community-funded news launches at Spot.Us
3. the evolution of the front page: “These diagrams were a study related to my Masters thesis project, Movable Parts: The Retooling of the Los Angeles Times. In developing an understanding of newspaper culture I decided mapping the evolution of the front page would be a beneficial exercise. The below images tracks the front page of the Los Angeles Times over the entire history of the daily.”
4. Memo to newspaper bloggers: Be human
5. Local TV Stations Are Facing Severe Cost Pressures—Here’s How They Should Cut
5. Newspapers Jettisoning Top Talent to Cut Costs - NYTimes.com: “But there is a business argument to be made here. Having missed the implications of the Web and allowed both their content and their audience to be scraped away by aggregators and ad networks, newspapers are now working furiously to maintain audience, build new ad models and renovate presentation. But they won’t stay relevant to readers with generic content ginned up by newbies with no background in the communities they serve.”

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The Onion’s making a push into the online local entertainment markets of ten cities — Madison, Milwaukee, Chicago and Austin already, and Los Angeles, New York, Washington D.C., San Francisco, Denver and the Twin Cities to come, says The Onion’s press release from PR Newswire.

They’re changing the name from AV Club to The Decider. You can see Chicago’s “Decider” site live here. Notice the decider.com domain — why they decided to use a new domain name and not cash in on the existing search-engine cred of theonion.com I have no idea.

So, beside the news that there’s another face in the local-entertainment-guide information game, the other interesting bit (which I heard from a friend of mine) is The Onion is taking all the market-specific articles they’ve published in the AV Club’s archives, and publishing them anew online. The advantage there is that these sites launch with more than just a front page and a handful of articles… also, it’s more information for search engines to index… also, and this is just me thinking out loud, I wonder why other print media with extensive archives don’t take advantage of that gold mine of existing, low-overhead, local information?

1. The Front-Page Mentality: All the most important stuff goes on the front page of a newspaper. But lookee here, on the web we can make our front pages as long and as big as we want! Let’s put all our important stuff on that front page! Make it huge! Yeah!
2. The Deadline-And-Its-Over Mentality (also known as “The Print-It-And-Its-Done Mentality”)
3. The It’s-Got-To-Be-As-Perfect-As-Possible-Before-It-Launches Mentality: This is a sister of “Deadline-And-Its-Over,” and it comes from years spent publishing information with a printing press. With a printing press, the only way to revise information that was published was to issue a correction, which was one of those Bad Things That You Did.
4. The We’re-The-Only-Game-In-Town Mentality: Competition was much easier when the competition was just radio, tv, maybe another daily. Now well … the entire internet is your competition. The.entire.internet. And, know what? There are some folk out there putting a whole heckuva lot more thought and effort into what it means to publish local information than you. Okay okay, that’s just a guess.
5. The Our-Content-Can-Only-Exist-In-One-Place Mentality: This takes a little explaining. A few of the print people doing online work who I’ve talked with about stuff say they have a hard time conceptualizing that an article headline link can be both on the home page of our site *and*, say, the opinion page section front.
6. The We-Don’t-Have-To-Listen-Unless-We-Want-To Mentality: This is a holdover from the days when the letters to the editor were the only place readers had a chance of sharing ink on a page with the professionals.

Got any more? Please, share:

1. Data Scraping Wikipedia with Google Spreadsheets
2. Two Things Design Experts Do That Novices Don’t
3. That’s the Press, Baby: What Copy Editors Do: Good prose in the blog post — interesting anti-copy-editor points in the comments too: “The problem for copy editors is that their job consists of catching other people’s slipups — because to err is human — and thus it seems unseemly to go around pointing out what we do. It makes others look bad, and it’s a lot more fun to talk about investigations we want to do. But then owners and business managers look at pages and headlines and say, oh, that’s all that copy editors do. The Times of India has pages and headlines too. Hey, let’s save money!”
3. Looking ahead, local will be the big media winner
3. Mainstream News Outlets Start Linking to Other Sites - NYTimes.com: Well how ’bout that.
3. “The article is not the story”
3. The building block of journalism is no longer the article: “The old building block of journalism — the article — is proving to be inadequate in the current onslaught of news. I’ll argue here that the new building block is the topic.”
3. Let’s Be Serious: Online Display Ads Will Fall Sharply In 2009
3. The New AP

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If ever there was clear evidence of the failure of bureaucratic journalism, this is it. We have created newspapers groaning with executive editors, editors, managing editors, assistant managing editors, city editors, desk editors, copy editors and wire editors. What is needed is to clean out the bureaucracy that is has either blocked or slowed down necessary change. The recent redesign of the Chicago Tribune was overseen by a committee of 37 of these editors. No wonder it was so dull. With their six-figure salaries and prized glassed-in offices, the bureaucracy is choking off the oxygen newspapers need to survive.

Sure, that’s a remarkably old-media, one-directional call to action. It doesn’t encourage fraternization among the other letter-writers. But it’s different. I’d like to call it “a quality example of how the verbs and labels in an interface can influence the action” … but I don’t have any proof.