Here's my vision of the networked, collaborative local news & information ecosystems, which I see coming into focus now.
(1) Towns, counties, regions and states have one or more leading, primary journalism organization — often they're new philanthropic-focused nonprofits (in the American Journalism Project model), other times they're a leading legacy news org that is adapting a mixed-rev model (in the Lenfest Institute for Journalism and The Philadelphia Inquirer model or in well-regarded public media) or in reader-funded community news orgs (in the VTDigger model).
(2) Community and ethnic media, and high-quality individual creators and even special-case advocacy groups inform specific identity groups, neighborhoods and other groups of people, with narrow business models, including events. (Examples include Lisa Snowden-McCray's Baltimore Beat, Jos Duncan-Asé's Love Now Media, and, differently, individual creators and even a wave of highly-functional neighborhood community groups).
(3) Then, this emerging category of "multi-local" or networked news orgs that bring deep expertise on national/global issues to localities, by partnering with those other existing local news orgs. I imagine a "menu" of important beats that any local nonprofit or legacy news org can bring in by partnering with one of a growing list of these org types. Examples here include:
--Add higher-ed coverage to your region with Open Campus (via Maria Archangelo)
--Add climate-change coverage to your region with Inside Climate News and with Grist
--Add a local weekly podcast with City Cast (via David Plotz)
--Yes, add tech, startup and economic mobility coverage with Technical.ly
These efforts could be brought together with various journalism collaboratives, like initiatives led by Jean Friedman-Rudovsky and Andrew Conte, Ph.D.
Danya Henninger and I were discussing just this. What else are other friends seeing? Jim Friedlich, Jeff Jarvis, André Natta, Matt Wynn, Nina Sachdev, David Boardman, Stephen Babcock, Sean Blanda, Matt Thompson
