Brevity
There is so much information out there that when I get local news I want it quick and to the point. I don't need a five hundred word essay to describe a fire that happened at the warehouse a mile away from me. If I see smoke, I'd like to know where it was, and why it happened. I'm not talking 140 characters short, but I don't want to have to scroll to read a news article.
Quantity
If things are brief, you can spend more time reporting on more stuff. I don't know how you'll do it, but figure it out. There's a lot of silly things happening around town. Let me know about them. You know what? You don't have to try to win an award for every article you write, just write it fast. If you want to a nice award save the effort for something that will win one.
Real-time
There's no deadline on the Internet for Christ's sake. When you find out about something, tell me about it. I don't want to wait until 4am when your in house publishing system decides to feed stories into the online content management system. Get out on the street, follow twitter, go to the scene, post the story from the scene.
Stories on the web are not stories in print. Post things fast, post them raw. Clean things up for print. Don't write things for print and send them to the web. Write things for the web and collect your thoughts and write something for the paper. Hell, if your story isn't interesting on the web, don't waste the effort of printing it on paper.
Categorization
I'd love it if stories were categorized in such a way that I could create my own sections that I can follow. It would be awesome if I could just automatically ignore anything about sports. I don't care about sports. I don't really want to read about sports or be bothered with it.
Popularity
Devise someway to have popular stories listed. I don't mean a 5 link list of popular stories. I mean an entire page dedicated to popular stories. Oh, and make it so that I can use those freaking categories I talked about earlier to find these popular stories.
Location, Location, Location, Location (did I say location?)
When things happen somewhere, don't put the freaking address in the body of the story. Add it as an attribute of the story and use that data. Use it in a pretty little map of stories that occurred nearby. That would be nice.
Time?
When things happen there is a where, but there is also a when. Attach the when something happen as data on the story and present things on a timeline and/or a map. It's not hard to do and if you're posting things in real-time, sticking a date and place in a story is pretty damn easy to do. Give your beat reporters cheap handheld GPS units, use their iphones, I don't care how, but stick the freaking time and location on stories.
Targeting
If your stories have a where, have a when, are categorized , and are posted in real time: I can chose what I want to see by place and topic. I can choose what is important to me. I can see things as they are reported. These things will make me happy. These things will filter out the noise I don't want to see. When there is already a lot of noise from many sources, I don't need to added noise.
Updates
If I am following a category or news coming out of a region. I'd love to know when stories get updated or perhaps I can decide to watch a story for updates and I will be updated in some way. That would be nice.
Final Words
If it was up to me, I'd shut down the presses, replace the big-ass HQ with a lean running nerve center and send the reporters out on the town. Give them a beat, a cell phone, a gps, a EEE PC and a camera and have them post everything they find as soon as the hear about it. Hire a dispatcher and monitor the reporters like cops on the beat. If the dispatcher hears something and a reporter is near-by, dispatch them to the scene.
