In Praise of Hyper-Local News.

I am a news junkie.  I read/scour/review/follow a number of different news sources every day ranging from the Washington Post and New York Times to Salon.com and The Atlantic. 

But do you know where I get my best?  Where I find the most interesting stories that really matter to me and impact my life and community in a direct, palpable way?  Hyper-local news outlets.   And for that, I read The Current newspapers and Georgetown.Patch.com.  It’s in these local sources that I can read about education news, events in the community, plans to replace our aging sewer system, etc.  News that I don’t normally see, even in the Post’s Metro section.  To be fair, I think Emma Brown does a wonderful job coving DC schools for the Post.  But I think there should be a team of Emma Browns, running stories every day.  Again, this isn’t a slam on her, but rather on her editors.

Now comes the news that the powers that be at AOL (which I guess owns the Patch family of outlets) has decided that there’s no money to be made in hyper-local news and that they will be shuttering about a third of the Patch sites.  This is in an effort to get Patch back to profitability.

As some recent stories about the sale of The Washington Post have noted, newspapers are not really a profitable business.  The old newspaper family dynasties that owned them and continue to own them (Sulzberger, Bingham. Graham, etc.) did more so out of a sense of community and service to that community. 

There’s no doubt that the news business is changing and newspapers, especially so.  But here’s the thing: I think that the Patch and The Current are the two most important news outlets I read.  Is national and political news important?  Yes, to a degree.  But what truly matters to me and impacts my life has more to do with what is happening at my kids’ school than in the halls of Congress.

Let me conclude with this: I hope the Georgetown Patch is spared the knife.  And more broadly, I hope the folks in the C-suite at AOL and elsewhere can finally figure out a way to see the value in local news and its importance.  In doing so, I hope they’ll place less emphasis on cash profits and more on the profits to be found in simply providing am important community service.