Louisville Courier-Journal mobile newsroom initiative and Salt Lake Tribune Innovations Lab

 I was reading an article about a failed shopping mall, and caught this at the end of the article:

MEET THE EDITORS NIGHT IN OKOLONA 

Courier Journal reporters are working from the South Central Regional Library weekdays in September as part of its mobile newsroom. We'd love to meet with you, and we invite you to meet the editors of The Courier Journal at 6:30 p.m. Tuesday at Meet the Editors Night at the library, 7300 Jefferson Blvd.

As part of this program, they're spending three weeks basing their "mobile newsroom" in a library in the Okolona district in the outlying county section of Louisville-Jefferson County (the city and county merged in 2003).

From "Why The Courier Journal is bringing its newsroom to your neighborhood":

Here’s the truth.

Everyone doesn’t have the same access to The Courier Journal.

There are people who are more connected and more comfortable reaching out to a reporter or an editor. People who know someone on staff or share something in common with them or just know how to get our attention.

There also are certain communities that get a lot of news coverage, particularly those that are booming with development — new stores, restaurants or subdivisions. Other neighborhoods get little media attention. Residents there are less likely to contact The Courier Journal or feel a connection to our staff.

We want to change that. So we are bringing our newsroom to you.

Interesting.

A different kind of concept is by the Salt Lake Tribune, which has created the "Innovation Lab" to communicate about best practice ideas and approaches to problems in the community. 

I wouldn't argue that it's absolutely scintillating, but the SLT, which is now a nonprofit, does focus on serious issues that the Mormon Church owned paper, the Deseret News, does not, from police killings, to misuse of police information by Brigham Young University, to development issues, the Great Salt Lake, the water crisis and drought, etc.

The effect is hindered by the fact that they now only publish two print editions per week, but it is still great coverage.

... it's still very important.  I was reading an article about a Ponzi scheme in San Diego involving a woman named Gina Champion-Cain, and the story ("The Charismatic Developer and the Ponzi Scheme That Suckered San Diego") suggested that part of the reason that she got away with it for so long was that her rise was simultaneous to a severe downsizing of the local newspaper, the San Diego Union-Tribune, which included a reduction in investigative reporting.

Newspapers and similar media matter.

-- "One more blow against community media: Washington Post drops Thursday "county" news special sections," 2017
-- "DC's community newspaper weekly, the Northwest Current, goes out of business," 2019
-- "Staff And Locals React To End Of Washington City Paper Print Edition," DCist, 2022
-- "Newspapers as public media: WBEZ, radio, an NPR affiliate, to merge with the Chicago Sun-Times," 2022
-- "Newspapers, community media, and knowledge about and engagement in civic affairs," 2020