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And perhaps no one has ventured out so far, yet remained so close, than Burkins. When deciding to accept a buyout from the Observer near the end of 2008, he decided this would be a great opportunity to dive into the direction he felt news is heading.
"[My leaving] was as much about my own personal aspirations as anything else," Burkins said. "But also, I did start to wonder if I'd be able to retire as a journalist. I'd always assumed that I would retire as a newspaper man, probably running my own paper somewhere. And I started to wonder if that would be possible, and if that job would be something I really wanted. When you spend so much of your time trying to manage a decline, it pulls away from the things you love, like journalism and producing good stories. I'm a dreamer by nature; I'm a builder by nature."
And what he built is Qcitymetro.com, a website devoted to news of relevance to Charlotte's African-American community, launched in December 2008. The site, which Burkins described as the hardest and most fun thing he's been involved with during his career, has grown each month in both content and visitors. He recently launched a wedding-oriented sister site, QcityBride.com.
In January, Qcitymetro.com joined an online partnership with the Observer and four other local websites. The project is funded with a grant from a Knight Foundation initiative known as J-Lab: The Institute for Interactive Journalism, which promotes the use of digital technologies for delivering news and information. The Observer applied for the grant, and it calls for the newspaper and its five partners to share content and explore ways to cover stories together.
"They can use four of my stories per week, and I can use four of their stories per week," Burkins said of his partnership with the Observer. "We worked together on CIAA coverage, on the 10-year anniversary of the disappearance of Asha Degree, who was the little girl who disappeared in Cleveland County, and they used a lot of my content from my coverage of the Jinwright trial. We've worked on things together and that's been fun."
Going "hyper-local"
The Observer's partnership with Qcitymetro.com is one of several ways the paper is attempting to expand its local coverage. The industry has termed this approach "hyper-local," which is news and information relevant to small communities that have typically been overlooked by traditional news outlets.
The hyper-local push by the Observer is evident on the Web, but it's also present in the printed paper. Over the past year, the Observer has launched four community newspapers: Lake Norman, Cabarrus, and two for South Charlotte. They appear every Wednesday as sections in the print edition and are distributed in the geographic areas they cover. For non-subscribers of the Observer, the community paper is also delivered as a free newspaper to homes in that area.
"We're really excited about that because we know that our readers need all kinds of news, but one kind of news they desperately crave — and it's difficult to deliver — is the very local community news," Thames said. "And by that I'm talking about a neighborhood level. That news, we believe we're beginning to deliver with our community newspapers. It's not all the news that people need, but it's a layer of news that they do need and they want. We've watched these papers, and the reaction from readers has been phenomenal."
While newspapers nationwide have been embracing the hyper-local concept, not everyone in the industry is fully convinced of its potential.
"Local has not been thought out entirely; there are some problems with it," said Tom Rosenstiel, director of the Washington, D.C.-based Project for Excellence in Journalism. "One is that the big metro papers have a hard time being hyper-local. They really can't; as they're shrinking their staffs in the face of declining revenue, they cannot cover all of the suburban communities that surround the center city. Listservs and weeklies and others may actually be able to be more hyper-local than a daily can.
"Community isn't simply a geographic thing," Rosenstiel continued. "It's also a community of interests, a community of people you know. In the modern era, not only with cars but even more so with digital technology, we don't live within the confines of a zip code. I think the thinking we've seen from Wall Street, from some economists, and from the news industry about what hyper-local means may be very literal and very simplistic. I think there's a long way to go to see how that notion of localism will really work in the marketplace, and whether it's economically viable or whether it is just something that seemed good in a consulting report."
For every reason why a new initiative or form of technology might be a solution to the newspaper industry's problems, there are just as many reasons as why it won't work. Largely, the newspaper industry is in experiment mode, desperate to find measures that will help it regain lost revenue.