There are some interesting takeaways from this column written by Topix CEO Chris Tolles. (Topix is a local news aggregator and community that’s focused on regions, cities and neighborhoods.) First, Tolles does some rough math:
There are about 1,400 daily newspapers and 7,000 television and radio stations in the U.S., and back-of-the-envelope math shows that they each produce about three to six stories per day, or about 22,000 local stories for the entire U.S.
If you ask me, he’s severely underestimating the number of local stories. Nevertheless, he says there’s a “vacuum” of local news. Which, if you look at it at a neighborhood level, you could argue he’s right.
“The internet’s solution to the dearth of local news coverage is the same as it has been with other problems of scale: let the people build it themselves…. In looking at sites like MetroBlogs, Gothamist publications, Outside.in, NowPublic, Baristanet and Topix (the site that I run), it becomes apparent that a massive amount of attention and investment has been paid to giving people a platform for engagement with the places they live.”
Tolles has a good point here, but I would interpret it differently: local media has an opportunity to leverage their online audiences to enable and aggregate more “crowd-powered” local content, especially at the neighborhood level. If you don’t, the national pure plays will beat you to it.