Cops and Robbers

Change the reporting model here. Make the cop beat about both cops and criminals. It worked for The Wire. In-depth crime reporting should include the backstory of criminals and invesigations, the impact on victims and communities, the nuances (for example, how behavior can become criminalized by new laws). Good crime stories can run and run. The blotter becomes a heist film.

International Coverage

Most international news is totally commodity news. Everyone chases the same press conference, etc. Sign up for A.P. just in case, but basically — why provide that kind of coverage? Instead, offer unique international blog content from people on the ground in the cities that matter to people in San Francisco. Tokyo, Paris, Amsterdam, Rio, Beijing, Mumbai, Moscow, Dubai. That's 8 bloggers and an editor to tie it all together.

We heard from an ex-Chronicle staffer that a big problem with having these far-flung bureaus is that the stories are all over the country, so the reporters end up traveling everywhere, wracking up travel expenses. Ok, they can't do all that traveling. Or if they do, they have to drive or take a train and stay with friends. Hey, desperate times...

Technology

No daily paper is going to beat Valleywag, Wired.com, Venture Beat, Mashable, and Techcrunch to scoops in the bay area. It's just not going to happen. They are too deeply integrated into tech culture.

BUT, a local paper can add value to all the niche scoops that these publications are producing. Curating all the bullshit that comes out of those websites could increase the signal-to-noise ratio by 10 times. Take the HuffPo model and quote freely while linking out to the sites that did the reporting. That'd do it. That's an enormous amount of value in and of itself. Second, take a look at Sarah Lacy's recent articles for TechCrunch. She's got an eye for trends and deep enough contacts in the valley to get the stories written. That’s what you need for a daily paper. In fact, she'd be a perfect editor of a Silicon Valley section of the S.F. Post-Chron.

Think about the kinds of tech stories that the New York Times or AP run about San Francisco. That's what'd work.

All that said, a venture blog with reporters down in Palo Alto and Menlo Park might be invaluable in that they could actually report out stories on startups instead of just pronouncing on them a la TechCrunch. That could be a fascinating beat. We say: take 3 people. Assign one to writing editorials a la Sarah Lacy, another to reporting stories, and a third to aggregating/curating the best content.

Because it is two different beats, I'd say take another team of three and recreate a blog that looks like Green Inc + Venture Beat or perhaps just Earth2Tech. There's space there for a new blog.

Food

In most newspapers, food is relegated to the style or entertainment sections, covered once or twice a week, and generally considered a peripheral subject. In the San Francisco Bay Area, food is often front-page material, since what happens in food here tends to shape what happens in food across the country. Food is increasingly getting the attention it deserves as a contextual factor in all sorts of other areas of concern, from health to education to national security. When farming, social justice, and environmental issues share the table with gourmet recipes, vineyard openings, and restaurant reviews, you have a food section that is robust enough for daily coverage and addresses food as it should be addressed—as a driving force and fundamental system defining communities and cities.

Possible partnerships with Yelp and other location-based, user-generated platforms that allow sharing and networking around local food culture.

Design

Much like food, design often falls within a consumer-focused section of the newspaper that deals with aesthetics, fashion, or interiors. In a region so connected to innovation, this is an opportunity to cover design differently. Every single thing we interact with and use on a daily basis is designed. This is a chance to push transparency, apply investigative strategies to uncovering how things are made and where they go. Green design and architecture would play an important role in this section but because sustainability will play a role in every section, there is no section that isolates the topic.

Sustainability

Sustainability, with a focus on the environmental impacts of things, should be distributed throughout the news organization. A small group of reporters would be assigned to dig for deeper stories, features, and impact journalism across all the PostChron sections. They would also be responsible for managing the consumer side of "green".

Arts and Culture

What does this section look like within a new model? How do we cover books, theater, dance, fine arts, and cultural events? User-generated events calendars and reviews culled from the niche enthusiasts who attend the programs? Dedicated reporters assigned to a culture beat as in the old model? How do we treat local cultural events and local artists compared to books or movies with national distribution?
One idea would be to just draw in all the current coverage of these types of events, providing local blogs with greater distribution in exchange or content. Still, it does seem to make sense to have a small team curating what's important in these spaces and providing reviews of key shows.

What's a Data Reporter?

Data journalism goes beyond producing interactives, although those are awesome, too. The tools (search, etc) available on the Internet can reduce the cost of investigative journalism. We'd install a 20 person tech journalism desk — half coders, half writers — that would look for ways to report new stories by scraping and searching government, corporate, academic, and scientific data.

The data desk could build projects using open source tools and release those tools for other citizens to use. Projects like ProPublica's ChangeTracker could/should be a model.

Copy Desk

Type of Desk: PanChron
The copy desk is basically what differentiates professional journalism. Let's beef it up instead of cutting it back and then set excessively high bars for making no mistakes.

Semantic Desk / Wikipedia-ing the News

Type of Desk: PanChron
A big part of the value of the old newspaper model was that it built a ton of institutional knowledge up about who and what mattered in a city. The problem is: all of that knowledge stayed within the organization. We'd dedicated a few people to comb through stories pulling out short descriptions and connections between people and projects within the city. This ever-growing pile of knowledge could be searched separately within the organization. Want to know about restaurant X or city commissioner Y? Search here to find the current state of knowledge about that proper noun. Like a super local, tightly-edited, consistent Wikipedia.

The model Matt Thompson is exploring & explicating over at Newsless is the most sophisticated version of this concept around right now. Under his model, the daily paper is just the "change log" to the community wiki -- and overall, instead of shoveling ephemeral content out the door every day, you're building an information asset over time.

One task of the reinvigorated, beefed-up copy desk (noted above) would be to take all the bits of content coming in, from neighborhood bloggers, political reporters, & the community itself, and fit those into wiki entries. So now, editors are a) vetting and improving information, and b) constantly integrating it into the larger context of the wiki.

One early implementation of this idea can be peeped at archExplore. DavisWiki is also a great example. Feel free to add more examples.

Photography

Type of Desk: PanChron
Rely more heavily on crowdsourcing. Pay for photos taken by civilians. BUT maintain a strong pool of photographers. Don't make them come into the office all the time. Let them act as a live network across the city. They can upload from home. Almost every phone has a camera in it now so citizen photographers could even upload from the street. And with geo-tagging capabilities often built-in to this technology, it'd be possible to create a live map or feed that captures news as it happens. Staff writers could then get more information and elaborate on the stories later.

Also, in the age of the pageview, the photo desk at most websites has become a major revenue driver. Witness: The Big Picture at the Boston Globe. That section has taken largely commodity photos and run tem at 990 pixels across and made itself into a friggin click farm, as we call it in the business.

Video

Type of Desk: PanChron
Original video content can easily be integrated with stories. This could be semi-professional staff video or user-submitted content. Flickr's interpretation of video as sort of a "long photograph" is especially interesting. A captured chain of moments designed to complement the article when a photo just can't do it justice. Think: parades, protests, police brutality.

Specialist features, always with a local angle

Healthcare and health promotion, personal and public finance, housing, food and food policy: the Bay Area (and its freelance friends around the nation/world) is often at the forefront of both problems and solutions in all of these areas. These stories have both local and national/international appeal.