Newspapers are local products, but local doesn't mean what it used to. I can use myself as an example.

I lived in Raleigh, North Carolina for close to 14 years. By the time I left, it had become something of a novelty to meet someone who was actually from Raleigh. Everybody was from someplace else. Regardless of where we were from, a fairly large percentage of us worked in a county different from the one we lived in. And most folks didn't stay nearly as long as I did.

When journalists talk about the decline of newspapers they like to blame the Internet, but I have a Powerpoint slide I like to use that shows that the long descending slide in readership started way back in the 1970s. Because of this, I've always believed that there were other factors at work. The Internet is not to blame.

If you want to blame something, blame globalization. That's what everybody else does. One of the factors contributing to the decline in readership is the fact that people are increasingly mobile and geography doesn't matter as much as it used to. For many years, we had a geographic alignment of interests - the boundaries of our political instutions, our economic markets, where we went to church and where our friends lived were all pretty much the same. That's no longer true.

I live in Washington, DC now. My wife works in DC three weeks a month, and on the fourth week, she works in Davenport, Iowa. One of her employees lives in Davenport Monday through Friday, and then goes to Chicago on the weekends, where his family lives. A colleague of mine at Georgetown lives in Detroit and teaches during the week at Georgetown. I'm renting my lakehouse to a guy who has a condo in Hot Springs, Arkansas, but who works all over the world getting data centers off the ground. He needs a place to stay for a year, because after a year, the project will be over and he'll be going someplace else for the next data center. My ten-year-old daughter lives in Raleigh and she has more frequent flyer miles than I do.

If you aren't planning on living in a given place for long, how "civically engaged" can you be expected to be? What do you care about posterity when its other people's grandchildren who will benefit or suffer from today's political decisions? If you're like me and live in more than one place, your civic engagement quota gets spread thin quickly. I spend a lot of time in Davenport, Iowa but not once has it occurred to me to attend a school board meeting. I've not worried one bit about zoning or whether we need more parks there.

The world has changed. My community does not correlate with any geographic boundaries. My friends, my family and my work is scattered across the country. What's "local" to me? If we lived in one place, I have no doubt that we'd subscribe to a newspaper. But we don't live in one place and we can't subscribe to a newspaper. It's just too complicated -- I always forget to stop delivery when I leave town. We need a newspaper that follows us from town to town. That's what the Internet does for me and that's why I have a laptop everywhere I go. You can fret all you want, but I'm not going to subscribe to your printed newspaper, and I'm not going to be as civically engaged as you think I should be.

I would argue that the reason social media is so popular is because it addresses this new, mobile reality. Facebook is a great way to keep up with family and friends who are geographically dispersed. Classmates.com is popular for the very same reason. Same with taking college courses online (I've taught online classes to soldiers deployed in Iraq). These kind of services help to solve problems created by our increasingly mobile society.

I have an information problem that I would like newspapers to help me solve. The Internet provides a way for them to do just that, but so far they really haven't done a very good job. The future of journalism isn't Flash presentations, multi-tasking multimedia reporters lugging video cameras and laptops to press conferences, blogs or some news-oriented Facebook mutant. An online newspaper, local or not, doesn't really solve my problem. An editor in Raleigh isn't going to be able to come up with a collection of stories that serves my needs. Neither is one in Davenport, Iowa or Washington, DC. At the same time, they do have information that I need -- it's just scattered in different locations.

Adding a video clip of the school board meeting to the story doesn't do anything to solve my problem. Wrapping it in a Flash presentation that takes a couple of days to prepare doesn't really help either. When you do either of those things, the only thing you've accomplished is that you've made the news gathering process more complex and more expensive without adding much in the way of additional information. You haven't made your product more useful. I still need information about all three locations. I just need to be able to find it, aggregate it and read it as efficiently as possible.

I believe the future of the Internet is text. The reason is that text can be processed by computers and information can be extracted from it in meaningful ways. Reuters' Calais service points in the direction of the true future of journalism because it represents a way to make news more useful by making it easier for me to find the information I need and it does it by analyzing plain old text.

My blog's atom feed is now partially "Calais-enabled". You can look at it here: http://choate.info/Blog/feed.atom. The Calais service analyzes the text of articles and identifies entities, events and facts. An entity can be a company, a person, a location, a URL, industry-specific terminology and so on. At present, the service focuses on business and economic news, so the kind of events and facts it tries to identify are things like earnings announcements, mergers, management changes, etc. It's supposed to be smart enough to recognize these things, even when different words are used to describe them. For example, I should be able to use this service to identify articles that discuss management changes at newspaper companies and I can could even use it to identify stories about a particular management change at a given company. What's important is that I am able to search for stories based upon what they are about, or what they mean, rather than searching for them based upon what words are used.

In my feed, all I do is extract the Calais-generated metadata and display it with each entry. At this point, the primary usefullness is just to see what kind of information Calais identifies. Nevertheless, I can see how Calais can help me solve my information problem in a very useful way. Imagine being able to have a service that notifies me of school board meetings in Raleigh, zoning changes in Washington, DC, traffic conditions in Davenport and what kind of delays to expect at O'Hare. In fact, I could track particular issues within each of these categories. I could be notified everytime something happens regarding a particular zoning issue. Now that would be helpful. I can sort of do that now, but not with the same precision and efficiency that I could do it if all news items were tagged in similar ways. It helps me find *my* local news. It also makes it easier for me to be civically engaged, too, because I can keep track of this kind of local information much more efficiently. Civic engagement becomes "less expensive" in terms of my time.

I could go on...but I'm in Raleigh and I've got to drive back to DC before my wife leaves on her flight to Davenport...