Would Wolfman Jack Rule the Web?

Marc Fisher over at the Washington Post has an interesting piece about the similarities between the Web and AM radio, which he calls the Web’s “spiritual grandfather.”

It is a good analogy. Fisher riffs off the idea that the Web, like AM radio, should take advantage of that fact that it can offer local news listeners can’t get elsewhere. “From tiny small-town stations specializing in farm reports and high school sports coverage to booming big-city outlets that pioneered the concepts of all-news, sports talk and Top 40 pop hits -- is where much of what's popular on the Internet got its inspiration,” he writes.

He credits radio swap-shop call-in shows with being predecessors to Craigslist, sports phone-in shows as earlier versions of today’s fan message boards. Stations that broadcast in other languages are “proto Facebook groups of an earlier era.”

Fisher’s points about the synergy of the two media are well taken. But he could be making the same inferences about newspapers. The one thing that city or town newspapers have that no one else has is local news. Reporters for local papers are the only ones covering city-council meetings and following local government.

But instead of investing in the new technologies or sending reporters to cover those local events, many newspapers continue to offer buyouts to their employees, gutting their staffs and eliminating much local coverage in favor of paying stockholders quarterly dividends. When the dividends dry up, as they invariably will, newspaper editors will be left with plenty of unique topics to cover, and no one to send.