“It’s not just news about your community, but also about your homeowner’s association, your apartment building, your kids’ classrooms, and the sports teams they belong to. Every family would have their own online local newspaper, assembled electronically every day based on that family’s log-in information. Your personal and super-local news would include everything from world events to school lunch menus for that day. Eventually it might even include your child’s report card. Obviously the schools have to be partners in this, and I think that could happen. Most school information is online already or heading in that direction. It just needs to feed to the newspaper’s site for aggregation.

The key is for the super-local information to come to the newspapers from volunteers. For example, every youth sport team would have a parent with a digital camera and the willingness to upload some pictures and write a few lines about the game. A simple user interface would make it easy to integrate the news about little Becky’s soccer game with news of the Lakers. They would have equal billing.”