Replacing newspapers

I'm starting this blog because I'm pretty sure I know what comes after newspapers. I'll put my ideas out there and hope to hear from people who disagree, since I certainly don't know everything.

I put my home town--Los Gatos, California--on the web in early 2006 and spent three years being a journalist--media id, police scanner, the works--so I feel that I understand what it means to cover the news. I also wrote and administered the underlying content management system, which is my real strength--I've been creating software for nearly 30 years.

I'm reading The News Rules of Marketing and PR by David Meerman Scott, but it's a refresher for me. The new rules are that intrusive, interrupt-driven, one-way advertising is dead, and that no one needs "the media" to help them reach an audience.

The web has meant the formation of thousands of virtual communities--bass fishermen around the world can now converse. But, for some reason, most actual, real communities--Wappingers Falls, New York, to pick an example--haven't used the web to full advantage. I'll pick on Wappingers Falls to make my point. The nearly 5,000 residents of the village work and shop in a wider ambit that runs from Fishkill to Poughkeepsie and as far east as Hopewell Junction. But Wappingers is a community, with various services and a vibrant downtown. Google Wappingers and you get:

Town Government
Wikipedia entry

The Wikipedia entry is first. The Poughkeepsie Journal covers Wappingers, and I'm sure it does a fine job (a search for Wappingers says "Did you mean Wappinger's?" No.). If a gasoline truck overturns or a man kills-his-family-before-turning-the-gun-on-himself in Wappingers, the Journal will be on top of it.

Fifty years ago, I'll bet Wappingers had a local newspaper. If you saw an ad for Friendly's Ice Cream in the local paper, you knew it wasn't the Friendly's in Beacon or Fishkill--it was the one in Wappingers, out on Route 9. If the Kiwanis club had an event planned for the day before Easter, you learned about it from the paper--maybe even the front page. You got to know the editor and his opinions. You could predict what his editorial might say each week, and you knew which folks would write a letter to the editor to disagree. The guy who owned the garage in town might write a Car Talk column (and might pay the paper to run it), and it was okay if his topic was the importance of a tune-up and he just happened to be running a tune-up special.

The local library kept every issue of the local paper. If you wanted to research an obituary from a few years back, you could. And if you did something noteworthy--got married, or enlisted in the army, your home town paper would print your picture. If you had a visitor staying with you and you needed to find out what time Catholic services would be held; the paper had that, too.

The web holds great promise to provide a lot of that kind of neighborly communication. We can certainly present round-the-clock news with the web, and we can maintain an event calendar. The problem is scope--what artificial intelligence researchers call "the world problem." When you say "Show me all weddings to be held this Saturday," the computer asks, conceptually, "What do you mean...in the world?" That's a lot of weddings. Usually, you want to set more reasonable boundaries--this county, or that village. "How big is your world?" And there's the problem with traditional news sites: the economics of newspapers encourage them to aggregate into big, metropolitan papers. They put that regional paper online and...well, that's a lot of weddings.

Put another way, a list of all 487 weddings to be held in the county this Saturday doesn't make me feel connected with my village. But--and this may or may not be a revelation to you--a picture of the eight young people tying the knot this weekend within walking distance of my house builds a sense of community. Now I've got something to talk about waiting in line at the post office--doesn't the Willis boy look too young to get married? Wasn't the Samuels kid the Valedictorian at the high school last year? Some call this "hyperlocal," but that term is already trite.

When you search the Poughkeepsie Journal for Wappingers, you land on localsearch.poughkeepsiejournal.com/. There are plenty of "hometown" and "smalltown" and other sobriquets on the web trying to create a single site that can pretend to be focused on your home town. Merchant Circle. Comedian: Where're you from? (without waiting) Oh? Me, too.

Newspapers and web software companies want one operation that reaches hundreds of thousands. Write once, read many. That's nice for them, but it doesn't put the web to work for individual communities. That's one of the "new rules" that David Scott writes about--the media companies don't get to decide how we do it.