It’s funny — I was talking with my coworker Doug today about how newspapers forgot to ask how the “Who / What / Why / Where / How” questions change when you’re publishing information online. In print you can be reasonably sure who your readers are. Online, not so much.

Anyway, so this post is about the “Where?” question, and three ways that online changes that question.

1. Datelines mean less: Anybody from anywhere in the world could be reading you, and a reader from King, North Carolina, has little clue what it means for news to happen in Commerce City, Colorado.
2. Context matters more: Nobody expects an essay on Commerce City’s history, people, and flora / fauna to accompany an article about news that happened there. However, that information would be useful, somewhere. In the article, no. But in a related page, perhaps of the wiki variety, yes. Why? Well, because I might be reading this article from King, North Carolina — or I might have just moved to Denver — and I might want to learn more.
3. Maps are free: No longer does it take X amount of hours for a designer to whip out a locator map. With the right CMS, locator maps can be automatic. Why is this important? Once you start pinpointing the latitude and longitude of the news, you give your local audience the ability to find out what happened close to where they live not just by happenstance, but by technology.

Got any others?

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.