Small business will be glad to invest money in ads as long as they can see that they work to get people in the store and money in the cash register.

So then the trick is to focus on that piece.

One approach might be to act as a “partner” for small business. Align incentives. If the people come in, the newspaper gets paid. If not, then not so much.

That will get everyone to have skin in the game, and the resistance to spending will melt away.

Selling advertising has to be reframed as enabling commerce. Terry Heaton at the POMO blog, has been on this soapbox for a long time.

It could mean that newspapers can partner with other local enterprises that service business. It could be cable channels, radio, and local commercial printers. It could also be some big box stores : Staples, Office Max, Office Depot or even the Costco or WalMarts of the world.

My personal favorite would be to see newspapers to partner with local high schools. Educating a community or education a high school community requires the same things. The only difference is that in high school the content is aligned to educational standards, instead of the news cycle.

It’s also rather insulting when panels are organized in the way described here – where somebody who is not currently helming a successful neighborhood-news operation is expected to speak for all those of us who are. Oh, and don’t confuse EveryBlock, Outside.in, etc., with “hyperlocal.” They aggregate what people like me do. They don’t do it themselves. Having any of them speak for hyperlocal is like asking Google to speak for the New York Times. If you’re having a panel and you have credible neighborhood-news site operators in your city, invite one or two of them. Is it really “choosing”? Do you not have one or two who are at the top in terms of traffic, quality, volume of material produced?

@Frank Roylance: As you say, the Baltimore newsroom is down to 148, not the 420 of a decade ago. That’s obviously not a good thing, but if we are talking about filling a void left by the death of a newspaper, let’s talk about the paper in its present size and scope, not what it used to be. Then, take away design, photography, and other positions that are basically production functions, and the number gets even lower. I’m not devaluing those positions and their importance to a newspaper (I was a newspaper designer once). I’m simply saying let’s boil that newsroom number down to people doing reporting if we are to do a comparison, since a blog has no need for a designer, a graphic artist, a photographer a (relatively) large number of copy editors, or layers of management. And then, take the number you have after applying that filter, and cull it to only people who are reporting on local news (as opposed to regional stuff, features, sports, entertainment, opinion, etc.), that’s the number to proceed from when talking about serious news blogs filling the gap.

Second, and more importantly, I DON’T envision a handful of blogs duplicating what a newsroom of 148 does. Plainly, they can’t. What I do envision is that the handful of serious news blogs will take up what is supposedly the core mission of the newspaper — government watchdog. That network won’t provide you with coverage of local sports, features, etc. But then again, newspapers never boast about those things as reasons why their continued existence is so important. If and when a local newspaper disappears, you are not going to have a big, monolithic entity or network moving into that void with a product that tries to be all-encompassing like the daily paper did. Instead, it will be a smattering of small, niche entities, each filling up a little piece of the vacuum.

Of course, what this means is that some areas will inevitably not be covered as much as before, while other areas might get better coverage than before — in essence, sort of like the way a newspaper works now (unless you want to argue that newspapers cover everything equally). How this will work out will vary wildly from place to place, and that’s why I say I’m more worried about smaller towns than larger metro areas, since bigger population = more people running blogs & niche sites + more attention from national sources like AP, ESPN, etc. = better chance a particular topic will be covered. We will probably also see a change in reader behavior and expectations in what is and isn’t worth covering. For instance, people are already going to Citysearch or Yelp instead of newspapers or news sites for restaurant reviews. And of course newspapers have long since lost their status as the place people go to for commentary. Maybe 5-10 years after a daily newspaper dies, readers will no longer expect their kids’ sporting events to be covered by a “professional” organization. Maybe local organizations will find other sites and forums through which to publicize their events and news. Reader behavior and expectations, like everything else, evolves.

Also, I say I’m not worried about government watchdog coverage in big cities because, as far as journalism goes, that’s the sexy stuff. If people are going to try to fill the void left by the death of newspapers, whether it’s with pro and amateur blogs, nonprofit organizations, or new start-ups, big city government watchdog is going to be the obvious, low-hanging fruit to focus on. On the other hand, few would think of building a nonprofit or start-up to cover Podunkville politics (and the amount of ad revenue to support something like that in Podunkville would be significantly smaller too). That’s why I think the loss of a daily newspaper will have a bigger impact on smaller towns than big cities.