Mobile devices will usher in a renaissance in local news. With Google, Facebook, Yelp and others building services to help us buy more local goods and services, there will be natural pressure for other kinds of location-based information and news as we layer millions of small posts, tags and comments onto our physical surroundings.
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The old business model for local news is deep in debt and essentially running on fumes. The notion of a truly mission-driven news entity is quite compelling. We see examples of it running quite effectively in the nonprofit world in entities such as YES! Magazine, Grist, and High Country News. While these organizations have editorial voices and geographic territories that make them operationally quite different from a local newspaper, they do paint a picture of what could be possible on a municipal level.
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The web's unbundling of the local newspaper business model didn't occur all at once, but as a one-two punch of vertical marketplaces for easily aggregated data like car buying, and crowd-sourcing platforms to get at the fragmented, more difficult to aggregate information in local markets. In essence, what the Internet did was enable web-based businesses to cherry-pick the profitable pieces out of the local newspaper's business model. When that happened, the flow of money for reporter salaries came under increased pressure and newsrooms across the US were slowly eviscerated.
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