What Makes Local News Really Local?

The question top editors ask me most, especially those at larger papers, is how to make their papers local, or more local. Most of what I suggest gets dismissed out of hand.

I’ve just concluded a series of workshops and coaching for the nine papers of the Schurz group, all medium to small papers. Eight of the nine are intensely local in their practices, in very different ways, and I’ve learned a lot from reading and observing them. Here are some practices and attitudes that make these papers ferociously local.

First, all really local papers write stories about ordinary people doing ordinary things in their communities. A citizen does not have to win an award or get elected or get arrested to get into the paper. Local papers realize that all ordinary lives are interesting. They take it seriously when readers tell them to write stories about them and about people like them.

Now that’s common sense, so why don’t larger papers do it? Because they can see no news value in ordinary people doing ordinary things. Our traditional news values center on events that depart from the norm, and include bizarreness, conflict, scale, celebrity (or notoriety). But the lives of ordinary people seldom include any of those news values. The problem, dear Brutus, lies not in their lives, but in our unexamined news values.

Most very local papers escape the trap of defining news strictly as events. Most real people don’t have much in the way of events in their lives, beyond births (and birthdays), deaths, marriages, little things from the point of view of larger papers. In local papers, “chicken-dinner news” is a mark of respect; in large papers, a term of derision.

Local papers regard normal things that happen to a lot of ordinary people as news. Once I was about to give a workshop in a large Stockholm daily. Twenty-four reporters had signed up, but only three showed up. I asked them where everybody else was. They explained that Sweden was suffering from a flu epidemic. “So they’re all out sick,” I asked, wondering how they managed to get the paper out. No, said my class, it’s the children who have the flu, and the whole nation is struggling with child-care problems. Puzzled that I had read nothing about that, I asked if anyone had written about it. “Of course not,” they replied. “That’s not news.”

Local papers don’t just report what happens in their towns, they explain it. Their stories about local government run long, capturing the ebb and flow of debate. They include the names of citizens who speak from the floor, not just public officials. Quotes in these local stories sound like speech, not like writing, with what people said left a little shaggy. The Imperial Valley Press, for example, in a story about standardized testing, quotes a student saying, “Yeah it’s good but the high school don’t teach us the things that’s going to be on the test so we can’t answer the questions because we don’t know nothing.” And the readers can see the problem very clearly.

Local papers echo with voices of their own readers. They include guest columns, especially about what ordinary people did with their friends recently, what larger papers would regard as low-interest gossip. Local papers write about what people are talking about: they make it news. And what young people are talking about is also news, best captured by having the kids write it themselves.

Very local papers devote lots of space to letters to the editor, actually letters from citizens to the rest of the community. Editors clean them up a little, getting the typos and libel out, but leaving them conversational. A good letters page lets the readers talk among themselves, not just with the paper.

Very local papers show the town to itself with lots of photographs of ordinary people doing ordinary things, such as receiving little awards. For ordinary people, these awards aren’t little. Larger papers despise “grip-and-grin” photos as having no content; local papers regard people celebrating each other as THE content. If I owned a local paper, every citizen in my town would appear in some photo annually. Clips from my paper would festoon every refrigerator door.

Such papers print lots of less-than-professional photos, including many shot by their own reporters and citizens. They print whole pages of wedding pictures, celebrating the most celebrated event in most family’s lives.

Local papers, especially small ones, find simple ways to help their readers navigate the paper and their lives. For example, the Bedford (Indiana) Times-Mail prints a simple map of the area beside the yard-sales ads in their classified section. They use a magic marker to put a dot on the map for each address of a sale. They don’t need a graphic artist to create such a map; they simply photograph it.

Local papers bend over backwards to print lots of lists. They print all the births and all the deaths and all the weddings and every real estate transaction, and they don’t worry about the resultant gray pages. One of my favorites, The Wiscasset Newspaper in Maine, prints the police blotter almost verbatim.

So, these practices make local papers intensely local, what I like to call “Local-Local.” The bottom line: Local-Local papers don’t regard little people as little.

If that statement makes your lip curl, maybe you need to rethink your assumptions about what journalism really is, and whom it serves.