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.