A good journalist with their hand on the pulse of the local community should know the courts, councils and whatever else is important in their locale. Then they should be able to get the indepth news stories.

I don’t have a comprehensive answer for the financial streams, but as far a content goes, the focus has to be on providing unique content. Newspapers are increasingly unable to afford the AP, and, to my way of thinking, their reliance on the AP to fill column inches is part of the problem with decreasing readership. Readers can get the AP feed ANYWHERE. The answer is localizing the content to a degree far greater than in the past. This content has to both be deeper and wider than ever before. If newspapers provide comprehensive content unavailable anywhere else, more people will see the value of subscriptions and the eyeballs will come back. With that brings back some of the advertising revenue streams.

I understand that it is expensive to pay larger reporting staffs, and that with many locales, tracking down the stories may be more of a challenge, but for most newspapers to survive they are going to have to make a big bet instead of playing defense by feverishly hanging on to long-held business models that are slowly fading away.