The internet is really shaking current business models. Maybe there is room for somebody to create a national platform for very local content and advertising, which could mean that local reporters would not have to think so much about that sort of stuff and be able to get paid for their work. Maybe something to tack onto Craigslist?

Somebody wrote that reading a newspaper for many is like wallowing in a pool. I do not want to be without my morning tea and papers. At weekends wallowing really is the word, and it is a feeling that I cannot get with the computer.

The problem is that Level 1 news will disappear along with the newspapers. Much of the event reporting is funded by newspapers.

I think that we actually need to return to more Level 1 news but much more locally. I don’t get enough 1 and 2 news for my region. There may be scads of it in Chicago, but my county in northern Indiana has very little. I’d love to know more about what’s going on in my city. Even aggregating the council meetings discussions would be interesting.

Part of the problem here in the States is that news became Big Business and started doing too much non-news items. Feature articles are nice but they shouldn’t be the backbone of your paper. Unless it’s local news.

With increased technology in differentiated print runs, you could create papers for each community (including ones with 1-2,000 people in them) with targeted news. This is similar to how you get your news from aggregators like Yahoo! or Google News. You get shown what you’re interested in. I’m not interested in news from Hobart but I might be about Kouts, which is in my county and close to my city.

The idea that one of those entrepreneurs had is good: use technology to create the basic news articles automatically. You set a spider to trawl the web for particular types of information. For example, my city lists information about City Council meetings on a certain page. Assuming that they list the information, you could program a web spider to crawl that site, excerpt the information, and create a reasonable article of Level 1 news: “The Valparaiso City Council met on Thursday night to decide ITEM ONE, ITEM TWO and ITEM THREE. [if COMMUNITY DISCUSSION then ....]”

Newspapers would then not need to have that many people involved. The problem is that you would still want some because interpreting this over time is interesting (Level 2 or 3). You could get guest writers to write about Level 3 and 4.

You could also start selling intelligence rather than news. I meant it as in “military intelligence’: not just facts but what trends are important. People do this very well with national business news and people are willing to pay a premium for it. I think Bloomberg is still doing well.

Local news is surely where the money can be made. The problem is that it’s a headache and newspeople like to think of themselves as Smarter Than You, whereas a local newspaper is all about what happened at the annual sack race at the elementary school.

At level 1 news probably is a as-is reporting, like news flashes, immediate reporting of events. Here new media has turned the old world upside down. By the time we get our morning newspaper we know all “level one” news.

At level 2, news is bundled and somehow hang together, and could probably be seen as a first level of analysis, making some sense of what is going on. An article or news program would probably contain interviews with several people, maybe tie several events together.

At level 3, news is probably considered as in-depth and analytical, exploring how things hang together and interact, making sense of the larger picture. An article would be quite long, on TV it could be a complete program.

At level 4 possible future directions would probably be discussed. This does not imply that other levels of news do not speculate about the future, but they are probably not as capable of doing so.

I think that what we are seeing is that newer media is wrenching away levels 1-2 from the newspapers, who then are left with levels (2)-3-4, and many probably cannot produce at that level. Personally I think that we will have a resurgence of the type of content that we find in weeklies and monthlies, with in-depth and overviewing material dominates.

These are just some preliminary thoughts and it woud be great if others could help to expand them.