This is a cross-post from my blog, Online Community Strategist.

Tracy Record, editor and co-publisher of West Seattle Blog took the time to answer a few of my questions during the biggest snow storm in recent Seattle history and for that I am grateful.

I asked Tracy why news organizations haven’t figured out how to own hyperlocal, and here is what she had to say:

“The question for some is really, SHOULD they? I think that newspapers, which even with their much-lamented cuts still have comparatively HUGE content staffs – I spent most of my old-media career in TV news, where you might have a dozen reporters/editorial managers spread across seven days and three dayparts, while big dailies still have dozens – should focus on context and perspective. Until and unless we add more staff, I can’t do that in a major way, though we do longer-form articles and enterprised stories/features when we can, and look for alternate ways of offering context and empowering people to find it themselves. Aside from that, some companies still think all they have to do is aggregate their content that mentions or targets a given neighborhood and voila! it’s “hyperlocal.”  Doesn’t work. There’s no “there” there, and if ever you need a “there,” it’s when covering a “here.” You need a trusted guide, a sense of neighborhood, even if that person/team (like us) doesn’t give opinions.”

Tracy also discusses whether or not neighborhood blogs are a viable option for laid-off journalists.

You can read the full interview, here: Building community around neighborhood news: An interview with tracy Record of West Seattle Blog (Part 1 of 2)

Angela Connor
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The Denver Press Club recently invited me to participate in a weekend workshop looking at the future, and the precarious present, of journalism.

Denver Channel 8 taped my presentation and put it online.  My wife found it stunning that, 1) anyone would invite me to visit their city to talk about Twitter and 2) broadcast it on TV.

I also got a chance to talk to newsrooms of both the Denver Post and the Rocky Mountain News.  I made some great friends. So it especially pained me after I returned home to Kansas and learned this week that the Rocky Mountain News was up for sale.  And people these days are hard pressed to buy newspapers.

But the folks at the news have decided to use the new media to help save the old, and some jobs in the process.  Check out what they’re doing at IWantMyRocky.com.

We ought to stop thinking of these as newspapers and see them as valuable news organizations: top content providers for Google and Yahoo! that are worth saving, no matter what their platform.

That’s part of the message of the documentary “Stop the Presses,” made by former Dallas reporter Manny Medoza and filmmaker Mark Birnbaum, which I saw for the first time at the Starz Denver Film Festival.  The documentary not only skillfully looks at the demise of the American Newspaper but also probes its future and why it’s worth saving.

As one viewer noted:  the film interviewed executives of some of the most respected newsrooms in the country and the best business observations in the film come from Dave Barry.

Dave, take the lead. We’re ready to follow.

“What’s black and white and completely over?” Jon Stewart asked last night on the “Daily Show.”

We knew the answer before he said it.

Here’s the video.

It smarts.  But good satire is that way.

That’s why we’re learning these skills for online.  But still, it smarts.

I remember a kind of panic going through the newspaper industry — around 1989.

Young people weren’t reading newspapers, and there was a great amount of money being spent trying to figure out how to change that.

“How are we going to get the next generation to read the newspaper?” publishers asked.  They spent a lot of money making youth-oriented sections for newspapers that went unread.

Now we know the answer to that question: We’re not.  But we were asking the wrong question.  The question should have been: How are we going to get information to the next generation?  If we’d asked that in 1989, someone in the news industry might have developed Facebook, MySpace or Twitter.  Instead, journalists are left to catch up with social networking — the tool that’s being used to pass information.

To succeed in that arena we have to be social.  Patrick Thornton guides us with on Beatblogging.org dealing with how have have to stop hiding behind bylines and put ourselves out there.

“I don’t think social media will really work for journalists, unless we are willing to share a little bit about ourselves and our personalities,” Thornton quotes journalism professor Carrie Brown from a video.

Meanwhile, newspapers may be disappearing faster than we can Twitter about it.  Editor & Publisher blogger Mark Fitzgerald says we could begin seeing the first cities beginning to lose their newspapers next year, according to the Fitch Ratings service.

“Fitch believes more newspapers and newspaper groups will default, be shut down and be liquidated in 2009 and several cities could go without a daily print newspaper by 2010,” the credit ratings firm said in a report on the outlook for U.S. media and entertainment.