If you got to blow up your newspaper, effectively immediately, meaning even the potential elimination of the traditional, nuts-and-bolts beats – cops, city hall, school board – and if you then got to rethink completely how we harvest stories …

What would the “beats” be?

Great question. It got a bunch of responses too, here are my favorites from the contributions:

• Stories Where People Voluntarily Get Out Their Old Yearbooks
• Collision (cars, people, ideas, whatever)
• Pieces of furniture that cost under $500
• Contentment. Or, what people do when they don’t have to do anything
• Politicians who are (not) helping
• Businesses that are not chains
• Secrets
• Things we accept but shouldn’t
• The things we do, but do not talk about

And these are the ideas I contributed:

• Red: News and local ephemera that has to do with that color.
• Last Month, Last Year: What matters now about what happened around here 13 months ago?
• Oooops: Who out there is making the ‘best’ mistakes, and how do they do it?
• PGs and QBs: Point guards and quarterbacks in the news.
• Five Years: News and ephemera about five-year-olds.
• Running on Empty: “Running out of gas”-related news and stuff

What I like about the Gangrey post and the ideas it sparked is the idea of the world worth talking about that doesn’t fit within the usual definitions of what makes a news or feature article.