media maven / By Marcy Burstiner

To Mumbai, Alice!

But I can’t believe you can produce quality news thousands of miles from the locality where the news occurs. Singleton’s vision would work if he were to consolidate back-of-the-newsroom functions and spend more on local news gathering. That means that even as he ships production jobs west, he hires more reporters here and pays them better wages so that they stay and accumulate valuable community know-how. You need the old guy in the back when you hire reporters from outside the community who leave every two years for better paying jobs.

You need to be nearby to report neighborhood news. It’s hard to imagine someone from a consolidated reporting staff far from Eureka talking to Donald Keys at the Rescue Mission, as Sean Garmire did recently to try to put a human face to our homeless problem. But even if T-S Editor Kim Wear’s job ends up in Pleasanton or Bangalore while the reporters remain in Eureka, the Garmires of the new paradigm would have a much harder time getting the OK to spend time and effort on such a story.

In June, Singleton gave a speech in Sweden to industry execs and quoted his company’s mission statement: “To be the leading provider of local news, information and services in our strategically located markets by continually expanding and leveraging our news gathering resources … We will continually strive to improve our profitability, while being a strong community partner and strengthening our work environment for our employees.”

So I think it is important that Singleton understand what it means to be a strong community partner and that his readers and consumers appreciate the localness of the local news his papers produce.

A healthy community needs a good source of news and information; one that is fairly impartial and which exists to inform day in day out. Part-time bloggers and news hobbyists can’t fill that role. We need newspapers, or at least electronic versions of newspapers, to be there to tell us things we don’t want to hear, and to help us comprehend stuff happening around us that we don’t understand.

If you are the type of person who cares about where your food is produced you should care about where your news originates as well. There is no organic label that separates the homegrown from the cheap import in the news business. But you should be able to smell the difference.

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