Mike McInally

A response is in order to a recent thoughtful post from Chris Nordyke about local news and the Gazette-Times. You can find Chris’ original post by clicking here.

Chris was responding to a presentation I made last week to a Leadership Corvallis class. During the presentation, I talked about the importance of local news — and local newspapers — and repeated something that some of you might have heard me say before: That papers like the Gazette-Times were founded by people who thought that successful towns require successful newspapers and that the reverse was true as well, successful newspapers require successful towns. (I believe both sides of that equation still are true, by the way.)

But the heart of the presentation is an exercise that’s meant to recreate our weekday page-one meeting, where editors gather to decide what stories should go on page one. (I’ll come and do the presentation for any group, if you’d like — and the actual 3 p.m. meeting is open to members of the public. Just call me at 758-9502 if you’re interested in attending.)

During the presentation, I confess my bias toward local news — if we have four or five good local stories and no world or national stories that demand to be placed on A1, I generally try to encourage an all-local front page.

Here’s a quote from Chris’ post:

” I share that bias, and frankly wonder who exactly goes to the GT as a source for anything but local news. One could assume, that even if someone does look to the GT for national/international info, are they likely the demographic (probably over age 65) that the GT really wants to reach out to long term? Do the majority of their advertisers want to reach out to that crowd? Seems to me that the large majority of readers read the GT for local news and info, and then go to their google reader, yahoo news, the huffington post, salon.com , wsj.com or other online venues for their regional, national or international news.”

Despite my bias for local news, I’m not so sure that’s entirely true.

For one thing, every time I’ve done the page-one exercise (and this includes the recent Leadership Corvallis class), the exercise ends with the participants choosing at least one world or national story for A1. For another, the letters to the editor that we receive reflect a wide interest in world and national news. Our readership surveys suggest that many G-T readers want to see national and world news in the paper — and this is true of readers of all ages, not just readers who are 65 and older (and who are, by the way, not a bad demographic to reach, especially in Corvallis, as Chris knows).

The challenge we face at the G-T — and it’s a challenge that other papers our size are facing — is to find the right balance between local news and the other news that readers expect. Part of the answer, I think, involves being smarter about the wire stories we pick: We need to be looking for stories that offer perspective and analysis about the biggest national and world stories. At the same time, we need to be sure that the paper offers at least brief digests of the day’s big world and national stories. We can do a better job of that — and I’d welcome your thoughts about how we can do that.

There’s another point Chris addressed that I want to get to — about getting more local stories into the G-T — but this already is too long. I’ll get back to that point in a later post.

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