Much of news aims at the “what’s new” angle, but that’s not always the most informative way to look at what’s happening. Sure, a fire claimed an apartment building and two lives yesterday. What does that tell me about the place I live? Besides “tragedy struck,” and “fires happen,” not much. However, that story could also include data on:

• How many people in my city die, on average, every year
• How many people in my city die accidentally, on average, every year
• How many people in my city die in fires, on average, every year
• How many of those people died in apartment fires
• How many apartment fires in my city happen, on average, every year
• How many of those fires destroy the entire apartment building
• What the different causes of those apartment fires were
• If the rate of fires in my city is going up or down
• If the rate of fire deaths in my city is going up or down

What’s the point of that? It puts what happened (the fire) in the bigger picture. It shows the reader where that fire fits in the community picture. If more than one newspaper in more than one city assembles this information then it becomes possible to compare fire deaths and fire rates between cities, which gives additional context, and can raise new questions and give reporters new fodder to evaluate local public services with.

How would this information happen? To deliver context dynamically, that data has to exist in a database. To get there, first, newspapers have to start synthesizing and organizing the news in their archives (ala Adrian Holovaty’s post, A Fundamental Way Newspaper Sites Need to Change). Yes, this won’t happen until newspapers start synthesizing and organizing the news they publish daily, which won’t happen until newspaper-dot-coms get content management systems that address the diversity of the information newspapers publish. No, articles do not cut it, and every day spent on the current article-based model of publishing is another day’s content that misses its potential.

Online newspapers do a shoddy job of connecting like-minded information. The internet opens many possibilities to connect like-minded information. The context that newspapers can build with all the information in their hands is deep and broad. It’s something television news can’t do. Video doesn’t break down in the way that the information in articles do. But it’s something that won’t happen without investing in online and in library staff.

Would this be profitable? Heck if I know. Here’s another question: What kind of news-gathering operation can current online revenues on their own support? There is a somewhat urgent need for product in the online news world: something that’s more than what we’re doing now, something that we can do on a regular basis, and something that builds on itself. There’s gold waiting to be mined in newspaper archives, and that gold isn’t in per-article sales. It’s in the information, names, photos, ads, illustrations, events, businesses — the life and times of a town. This is information nobody else has, and it’s time to start doing something with it.

1. “Local” means it matters. Take advantage of it.
2. Newspapers harness and print tons of information. Do more with it.
3. There’s an amazing amount of information available in the community. It’s time to harness it, and then reward the community for participating.
4. If you’re not interacting with your audience, you’re not building much loyalty.
5. If you have an advertising-focused registration system, you’re not building much loyalty either.
6. The article is a decent way to tell a story on paper, but it falls way short online.
7. If a local tv news station’s web site gets more traffic than yours, you’ve got serious problems. Start building community now. Already building community? Start rewarding participation.
8. If your workflow still involves online employees cutting-and-pasting the night away, replicating work already done on the print side, that ain’t acceptable! Fix it! Now!
9. The longer you hang out with inadequate content management systems, the more you become like them. Inadequate.