Local is what local covers

Following up on my last post, I started listing in my head all the places and non-places my local newspaper, like every paper I've read or worked for, covers. Here's a partial list for a few news organizations:

The Press Democrat (Santa Rosa, CA):

Places:

• Santa Rosa
• Rohnert Park
• Petaluma (bureau)
• Sebastopol
• Winsdor
• Healdsburg
• Graton
• Guerneville
• Ukiah (bureau)
• Lake County
• Mendocino County
• Occasional ventures into Napa, Marin and San Francisco

Non-places:

• Sonoma State University (just outside Rohnert Park)
• Santa Rosa Junior College (in Santa Rosa, Rohnert Park and Petaluma)

The Fremont Argus

Places:

• Fremont
• Newark
• Union City
• Niles Canyon

The Hayward Daily Review

Places:

• Hayward
• San Leandro
• San Lorenzo
• Castro Valley

Non-places:

• CalState East Bay
• Chabot College
• Hayward Executive Airport

The Signal (Santa Clarita, CA):

I grew up here, reading this paper

Places:

• Valencia
• Saugus
• Canyon Country
• Newhall
• Castaic
• Agua Dulce
• Placerita Canyon

Non-places:

• College of the Canyons
• Wm S. Hart School District
• CalArts
• The Masters College
• Henry Mayo Newhall Memorial Hospital

None of these papers are major metros. The Press Democrat, by far the largest, peaked at around 92,000 daily subscribers a few years ago. The rest are small to mid-sized local dailies, covering cities between big cities with small (and shrinking) staffs.

Not all these places I've listed need a dedicated beat reporter, but online, it's not hard to turn any definable place into a focused page with a permanent URL and an RSS feed. A simple tagging structure--ideally separate from topical tags--would get us our local news feed, without any users having to hack something together on their end, and nothing harder for reporters than writing a dateline. It would make me happy.

Before: Finding a local news feed | After: New tools for new news