I rarely indulge myself with a purchase of the Sunday NY Times, but yesterday was an exception. I’m still reading the thing today and as I wade through page 85 of the business section (okay I’m exaggerating just a little) it occurs to me that there is more original staff written content in one section of the Times than in the entire Winston-Salem Journal. Heck, there’s probably more original content than the Journal and the Greensboro News & Record combined.

I don’t point this out to slam either of those local papers per se, rather I think it highlights how lean those local operations are running these days and how much they rely on wire services.

Of course the Gray Lady isn’t what she used to be either and one could argue that her quantity does not make up for her supposedly declining quality, but it is still somewhat bothersome to realize how slim and homogenized our local rags have become. 

It’s easy enough to lay the blame on market dynamics but I also think that the folks at the local level could get a lot more aggressive in mining local talent for content. They’ll probably never be able to hire and pay the number of reporters and writers to produce even a percentage of the original content that they’d like to, but they could definitely do more to open their walled gardens and work with independent writers, photographers, essayists, videographers, etc.

I mean if the Journal can get three or four book reviews written by local, independent reviewers for each Sunday paper then why not do something similar in other areas?