I'm pretty sure you can find enough advertisers to support low-paid reporters to cover local zoning board and city council meetings. The Washington City Paper does it. The Dupont/Georgetown/Northwest/etc Current papers specialize in it.

What's hard is supporting such coverage with a lot of well-paid reporters covering everything from national news to on-the-scene international events.

Exactly. I'm pretty sure that the only reason we have any accountability whatsoever in NC government is because the Raleigh News & Observer embarrasses them for their failing on A1 on a regular basis. Great interview with David Simon (The Wire) on Bill Moyers about this issue recently. Take away local newspapers and state/local officials have almost no accountability.

I am sick of all these hand-wringing posts about local papers pretending that every town in the U.S. has a Washington Post to provide "local" coverage. My monopolistic "local" Arizona paper is part of a chain of papers owned by a rich family in Yuma (half the state away) that as far as I can tell are old school Birchers with ties to Goldwater. We get "guest" editorials from the former head of the NRA, the wife of the former head of the NRA, Canadian wingnuts of the Pacific Institute, and everything in between (i.e. the hard right and the batshit hard right). The coverage of local issues usually deals with water and developer issues, and the coverage is usually framed as the developers never getting a fair shake, so we need to provide them with more welfare and drill them some wells so they can drain our aquifers to give us more McJobs.
If given the choice between having local coverage that I simply can't trust and having none at all and hoping some local bloggers can fill some of the gaps, I'm sorry, but I'll take the bloggers.

I'm fumbling a bit on this because it seems obvious to me that there is a big gap that noone seems to see that can be filled.

Let's say there is no 'real' newspaper in Portland, only an online thing that covers city, area, state and national issues. But instead of linking somewhat randomly to blogs which cover most of these issues, there is some organization that works somewhat like AP or Reuters (and maybe is non-profit). Its job is package/make available news produced by free/low wage coverage of local events, and disseminate state and national coverage (perhaps with higher wage specialist reporters (formerly called bloggers). Payment for use is minimal or free, but big enough that a national story that gets picked up by lots of aggregators will return the writer/reporter a living wage or more. This could include commentary/opinion as well. Think of it as AP without the freakish control and costs associated with annual memberships (per story compensation instead, paid from online advertising).

Anyway, the answer is net based (and not tree-based) but the question isn't being asked (from whom, how, and payment). This is clearly a less secure world for the writer/reporter, but surely better than no job at all.

Why should the reader have to maintain a huge list of web links (or RSS feeds) on their own?

Ezra - the trouble with you and Matt having your secret decoder ring thing is that when you blog on the same topic, I gotta comment twice. In this case - yes, City Paper and other free weeklies. They always get left out of the hand-wringing discussions about the death of local newspapers. They have a revenue model (free but paid for by a LOT of massage parlor ads), that seems to support a lot of coverage of the school board, city council, zoning hearing stuff that Simon loves so well. Your blogger assignment is to analyze this model, it's prospects for survival, and at continuing to keep the local beat reporters employed.

Go.

I shudder to think of the effect on local and civic corruption from the disappearance of local newspapers.

In this case - yes, City Paper and other free weeklies.

Neither Ezra nor MattY mentioned these. I really have no idea why.

What's causing the anxiety about newspapers is that a lot of high-profile metro dailies have gone under over the last year or two. What about the small-town weeklies and metro-area alt-weeklies? How're they doing? As long as they survive, they'll be your source for local coverage of small-bore issues.

"As long as they (local alt-weeklies) survive, they'll be your source for local coverage of small-bore issues."

Just as long as Craigslist (or whatever's next) doesn't suck up all their revenue from strip joints, massage parlors and the like.

"In that way, the fear isn't that we'll stop having news. But that that news will stop forcing accountability."

No, the fear is that we'll actually stop having news when the weekly paper comes out on Friday with a story about Monday's city council meeting or when the unpaid blogger who's been covering the local zoning board suddenly gets a sick kid or has to work overtime and the blog is left fallow.

Mike

My local (Pennsylvania borough level) government is using its recently established email list of citizens to blast out corrections to errors in stories about the borough and council proposals that appear in the local newspaper (which covers several neighboring boroughs). It will be more complex than just newspapers being replaced by something digital. The entire set of information flows will be changed on the tubes.

(The local school district is also using email and web page information distribution (including a Facebook page) to good effect)

OK... But look at Broken Sidewalk here in Louisville.
http://brokensidewalk.com/

A whole blog about transportation and infrastructure in a mid-sized American city. Or Urbanophile in Indianapolis.
http://theurbanophile.blogspot.com/

In Louisville, we have a mini-blogosphere of neighborhood blogs. Many of these folks are neighborhood activists who have been involved with local issues for years.

I wouldn't want to do away with the Courier-Journal or our TV stations, but there's lots of good local coverage online.

Streetsblog demonstrates that you can have coverage of local events, so long as there is an interested party willing to do the coverage for little or no extra pay--which, if the story is that important, there almost always is. The problem is of course getting this reporting to the general audience, not simply those who go out of their way to find it out. That is what newspapers (along with local TV and radio) are useful for. But there's nothing stopping some other interested parties from starting their own online aggregators of local news for little expense--since you don't have to pay for any 'reporters' but rather just link to their blog posts from your site.

Dude, ease up on the self-plagiarization, or you'll go blind.

Besides, a handsome young lad like yourself should be able to find someone special to plagiarize with. It's Spring, after all; young man's fancy and all that.

"And that only works because newspapers are hard to ignore."

That's a historical artifact. As more people get their news online that will change. It's all about resonance. Look at how effectively Drudge manages to jerk around the Republicans.

Interesting question. Looks like we may eventually be heading that way.

"self-plagiarization"

I prefer the term "journalistic masturbation"

I really believe that these social networks will have a huge impact on what we can accomplish as groups, it'll help us be very organized and communicate.