Rethinking the mission and purpose of local reporting

[Commentary] How do you define the mission and purpose of local reporting? Cover the news? Hold institutions accountable? Maintain a well-informed citizenry? Hold up a mirror to the community? Search around the Web for statements of journalism’s purpose and you’ll find all of the above, and more like them. And there’s a lot of anxiety these days about the present and future of this mission. With local advertising and circulation revenues spiraling steadily downward, and with newsrooms shrinking along a parallel line, two things are evident. Whatever the mission of local reporting is: 1) A lot less of it is happening now. 2) Even less will be happening in the future. In many places in this business, the central question these days is: How can we drive revenue from new sources, so we can keep supporting the functions of journalism that are critical to a free society.

I think the facts call for a different conclusion — one that local media companies are ignoring to their great peril. That conclusion: We’re not producing the right content, or at least not nearly enough of it. If we were producing content that large numbers of people felt they really needed every day, we wouldn’t be losing our audience. So we need to start with a different question. Not, “How do we fund journalism?” but “What is the content that local people really want and need?