"The entrenched job loop for ambitious journalists – sending college grads like Peace Corps Volunteers off to short-term stints in far-flung outposts, en route to isolated newsrooms that poorly cover a patchwork of neighborhoods and suburbs – isn't working for either news people or the communities that they cover."Ivy League grads skip from paper to bigger paper, seeking journalism awards and the prize at the top, a job at one of the country's big dailies, Bunch writes. This might be part of the problem hurting papers today -- a lack of connection with a community means the reporters aren't writing articles that will grab readers' eyeballs.
But I wonder if smaller newspapers need to rethink their mission. Why do small city papers include world and national news? It might have been the case 50 years ago that their readers relied on their local papers for this news, but today surely most of their customers are reading old (world) news by the time the paper lands on their doorstep. Should local papers be truly local? Would they serve their purpose better if they stopped filling their pages with wire copy and invested their money in local reporters willing to dig into the issues bugging their readers?
