[bluetwo]

Hope they find much success and build a model that can be replicated.

It is a sin how little effort is put into local news. It is far easier for large corporations to re-package the same national news into different markets, than it is to do good journalism at the local level.

Your local news affiliate on ABC/CBS/NBC/FOX mostly just repackages stories from other affiliates, or run something easy to cover stories like a house fire or inclement weather. This local coverage is MANDATED by the FCC to benefit local communities.

Want to know what you city council voted on this week? What bills your state senate has passed? What non-profits have done to benifit your community? Good luck. It is unlikely that they will cover it.

[Zelphyr]

These days I've noticed they're getting even lazier than repackaging stories. They just put a few lines of text before and after pictures of tweets.

[hackermailman]

There's little community blogs/papers here that cover that usually run by retirees and students though the real issue is having people around that can understand the gigantic legislation being pushed through city councils. Common here for thousand plus pages to get floated around nobody has time to sift through unless it's their F/T job to do so.

[lostphilosopher]

Wow. I would love a news media product that covered _exactly_ those topics.

(The closest I've found is MPR, Minnesota's local branch of NPR.)

[prostoalex]

Blame the advertising-driven revenue model.

Human attention is the only currency the advertisers respect and are willing to convert into dollars. Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat command attention. So do online forums like this one. So do [to a lesser extent] televised sports and performances.

Local news is on the losing end of this battle.

[gkoberger]

I always wondered why repackaging content is considered a bad thing. I feel like hundreds of thousands of hours are wasted by local journalists writing about national events, with nothing to add to the conversation.

Yes, Trump is important. But why does every local newspaper write their own article about everything he does? For every news item, there's thousands of articles on Google News, yet only 1-2 are worth reading.

To me, this seems like a huge reason journalism is having trouble. They're spending tons of time and resources just rewriting the same news stories, rather than embracing their strengths (local news; let WaPo/NYT/AP/BBC/etc handle bigger news stories).

[steego]

> Hope they find much success and build a model that can be replicated.

I'm not sure Montclair is the best place to build a replicable model. It's a nice town, but it's also a pretty unique bubble (even compared to the rest of New Jersey). It might be a good place to incubate an idea, but any lessons learned there probably won't apply to most places across the country.

[mholmes680]

I don't know about that. As a fellow NJer, I agree on your assessment of Montclair, but this story is about a couple who got in touch with the community and wants to share knowledge in that community to help it grow. I don't see how that doesn't apply elsewhere, or how they're wrong in approach. Actually, I even believe the part about not in it for the money.