New trend in newspapers: Local, local, local

There's a new trend in the news business that calls for newspapers to go "hyperlocal." An out-of-state visitor who recently spoke in Whitefish summed it up by saying, "Local, local, local."

Here at the Whitefish Pilot, we don't give lip service to the word "local." We mean business when we say we cover the local news. It's hard work, and we actually do it.

Our sportswriter, for example, actually goes to local sporting events and writes about what he saw, not what he imagined. Our readers will find write-ups about all the games and races every week, not just seasonal bios or wrap-ups. If a reader wants to know who won a game — we'll tell you.

The Pilot also has a full page devoted to letters and opinion pieces so locals have the opportunity to express their ideas and views. We don't set aside space for regular columns by nonresidents who write about issues in other parts of the country.

We also run engagement, wedding and birth announcements and obituaries. In fact, we help people write engagement, wedding and birth announcements and obituaries. People's lives matter.

When a local asks us to run an announcement for a small fundraiser — a garage sale, a flower sale, a rummage sale, a bake sale — we don't turn them down because they're not important enough to be recognized.

We don't pack the back pages of our paper with filler material — horoscopes, nonlocal movie and book reviews, columns by out-of-state skiers and faraway chefs. Readers can get all that stuff for free online. Our focus is on local news.

And we don't cherry pick the news, either. Instead of only writing stories that are trendy, hip and entertaining, we provide the news that Whitefish residents need to know so they can be informed and participatory members of our community.

And we do it in a timely manner. We don't report stories that other newspapers ran several weeks earlier.

Take election coverage. The Whitefish Pilot interviewed all contested legislative candidates running in the Whitefish area in this year's primary election. We also interviewed all three sheriff's candidates one by one and ran biographies on all contested countywide judicial candidates.

But we're not done. We'll be following up with more interviews before the fall election.

We attend meetings and get to know the community's leaders and government officials on a first-name basis. That doesn't mean we march in synch with them. That's impossible in a town with as much diversity and political energy as Whitefish.

Over the years, we've gotten to know a lot of families by the names of their children who appeared over and over again in the Pilot. We know what they did in school and where they went after they graduated — to the military, to college and to public service somewhere in the U.S. or overseas.

To us, that's local, local, local.