Something kinda-sorta related to this has been running through the back of my mind a few days. I’ve been wondering what smaller papers will do – not to mention big ones – there’s not enough local stuff going on unless you give everybody on the arrest and divorce lists a paragraph or three and near-local TV stations can scoop almost everyone in conventional media – so small papers are stuck.

So I wondered how it could work if they kept the little local stuff – x died, Joe Bob Dawson got busted for meth sort of thing – but add in-depth stories. The kind of good looks at current stuff that NPR tries to do but serialized over several issues of the paper.

The Ash spills got me thinking about this even more. There was a blogger who was going to head over t Kingston to do some coverage and I vaguely recall that they were paper-affiliated. Anyway, so they’re over there and so are other small paper folks and it occurred to me. Twitter & blogs are almost to the point that they could be used for some collaboration work. Say a few reporters want to cover a big story but they all can’t go. Someone from West TN and someone from Knoxville and someone from Shelbyville end up going.

They collaborate on a long, fact-filled, infographic & photo covered piece, the kind that would fill several pages if printed all at once. Then it gets broken up into smaller pieces and serialized over three or four days. But, it prints  over Monday through Wednesday in papers in Martin, Collierville, Jackson, Centerville, Clarksville, Shelbyville, Lebanon, Cookeville, Cleveland, Maryville, Rutledge & Kingsport in Tennessee, plus several cities in Kentucky and Alabama that might be interested - all of them far enough from each other that their coverage doesn’t overlap.

Each of the papers might pay a fee for the rights to run the story that gets split among the three reporters and whoever handles distribution. Now, other papers can also run the same serial if they so desire later in the week if it’s not as big a draw for their town but the other papers still don’t cover there, and pay a lower fee.

This way maybe the serial aspects would draw readers in daily to get the full story, the papers play on their unmatched ability to provide the full details in a way that TV can’t do (differentiation is the name of the game), and people get the full story.

It’s possible it could work on an even more local basis. A The Franklin paper and the Springfield paper could run the same stories and few would know or care. Anyway, just a thought.