On local: speaking with a friend who finally ditched their own long-standing subscription to a clearly-walking-dead local paper, the one element most missed wa

On local: speaking with a friend who finally ditched their own long-standing subscription to a clearly-walking-dead local paper, the one element most missed was coverage of local arts and culture events. Even a national publication might be able to address that with a few regional editions which focus on events in major cities. For, say, the NYT, covering LA, SF, Seattle, Chicago, Boston, Washington, and perhaps Houston or Dallas, might at least give a proxy of regional coverage, and I'm aware that at least some papers do offer a regionalised edition for at least some places. Sounds as if you're doing more news aggregation than news production, which ... doesn't seem to get at the question of how to actually get local news produced in the first place. That's a long-standing challenge. From what I've read of news history local newspapers pretty much always did function as both a local challenge on national/international reporting (usually through wire services) with a gloss of local coverage and advertising. This also meant that by subscribing to the local paper, readers were getting national stories and features. Often stories would run in multiple papers nationally with small elements changed to fit or feature locations or features specific to a local paper's readership. With Internet-based distribution, much of that's disintermediated, as you note. Glancing over your homepage: what I'd like to see is an arrangement that groups similar topics together, rather than a random sequence of stories. See Postman's description of the contextless news wire (I think that's in Amusing Ourselves to Death). And I've dropped you an email, check your spam folder ;-)