“We still think community newspapers have an audience and it’s not going away,” Richard Connor, publisher of The Times Leader in Wilkes-Barre, Pa., said. “There will always be an audience for local news.”

Amen.

It’s this thinking that will keep newspapers alive for a long time to come.

The regional newspapers such as the Boston Globe, the Raleigh News & Observer, the Durham Herald-Sun, the Austin American-Statesman, those are the papers that are in real trouble. They’re too big to cover local news and too small to cover national events. Plus, readers get their national and international news from television and the Internet. Forget that.

Cover the local stuff.

All politics is local, former House Speaker Tip O’Neill said. So is news. Cover the city council and the impact it is having on gardening by individuals. Cover the school board and the teacher layoffs. Cover the local transit authority and how they decide which potholes to fix first. Cover the high-school football team’s season. Those are the stories that impact people on a daily basis. That’s news.

And it’s that kind of news that will keep newspapers alive for a long time to come.

For a related story from NPR.org, CLICK HERE.