This item about the future of traditional newspapers by Jim Horton in his Online Public Relations Thoughts blog resonated with me for its simple but powerful logic. He writes:

Newspapers need to play to their strength -- local news generation -- and to get away from running Associated Press and Reuters wire stories that everyone has read 12 hours before online... The value of newspapers is content generation and not content redistribution.

Maybe that's not a novel perspective, but it is the first time I've seen it put quite that way; quite that succinctly. Or maybe it is just that this week I'm in a place that coincidentally makes me more receptive to hearing and understanding this?

This week I'm spending a few days and nights with my 95 year old father who lives in my boyhood hometown still. Every morning there are two newspapers on the driveway: USA Today and a local so-called Metro West daily. The latter is the newspaper I delivered door to door in boyhood, and the one I went to work for fresh out of journalism school. I hadn't seen it in years. Dad, by the way, is on his computer and on the Internet daily. He's got a whole set up in the upstairs alcove off his bedroom.

It is the local paper that is most disheveled at the end of every day.

Two nights ago I paged through the local newspaper, too. There was a story about a 40-something-year-old man arrested for following a school bus in town while not wearing pants and doing all the things you'd expect of a man who drives around without his pants on behind a school bus. OK, then!

It strikes me that we live in two separate worlds at once. By day, at work, we're hurried, global citizens in anonymous participation or readership of worldwide news and events. In our homes and among our families, at the end of the day, we're still neighbors who want and need to know what's going on next door, down the street, and around town.