Building in primers on big local issues is something we’ve begun talking about at my paper, and I’m still trying to figure out what’s taken us so long to realize that this is a vital part of our journalistic duty. Why aren’t more news orgs churning out these explainers? Laziness? Stubbornness? Arrogance? A feeling that the audience already knows this stuff? Plain old lack of time? Whatever it is (and I suspect it’s a bit of all of the above), we’ve got to get over it and start giving people what they need.

When you say “more successful news sites,” I think we’ve got to recalibrate our notion of what constitutes success. Right now, you might be a general-assignment reporter for a newspaper, whose stories on local crimes, early-morning traffic accidents, random press releases and the like occasionally find an audience of a few thousand people. In the aggregate, let’s say your stories are click-fodder for 50,000 unique users over the course of a month, and maybe 150,000 pageviews, a few thousand comments, etc.

From what I’ve discovered, here’s the problem with the traffic you’ve accrued: it’s not worth all that much. It’s unpredictable (i.e. it’s difficult to forecast and consequently sell); it accrues to categories that don’t draw a premium from advertisers (traffic, crime, etc.), and the types of users looking for this news aren’t really seeking a relationship with their news site, just a one-morning stand. (So you can’t do much in the way of demographic targeting to these users, ’cause they probably don’t want to give you their registration info.)

The only way we can monetize this audience is in volume, so we’re seeking quantity from you, not quality. Write more stories, quicker. They’re crappy-ass, hyper-commoditized stories, but every now and then they find their way to the most-read column. Your audience hangs by a thread; the slightest hurdle to reading your information might send them away.

On the other hand, you’re a beat reporter who’s built a solid (and growing) constituency among an engaged segment of readers deeply interested in your topic. They read your stuff because you help them understand something better about the world. You’ve been administering a wiki on your topic which starts to get a tiny, but growing bit of traffic as you add pages and content and promote it from your blog. Your blog itself has a devoted fan-base of 10,000 people who read it at least three days a week. They leave wonderful comments; you start telling people that the real journalism happens in your comment threads.

With the right salesperson, you might get sponsor interest in the blog/wiki, as well as appeal to a nicely targeted group of advertisers. Your readers love you enough to answer the demographic surveys you pitch at them a few times a year.

Over the course of a year, your wiki might accrue more traffic than half of the stories written by the GA reporter that never found an audience, with just as much time spent on both sets of content. And it would be much more valuable from a revenue perspective. Over a longer period, the disparity in value might become starker still; in fact, your growing repository of content (blog archives; the wiki) might beat the GA reporter’s output for traffic with less and less work on your part.

None of these numbers are real. In real life, the GA reporter’s traffic could totally trounce that of the beat reporter’s, whether over a short spell or a long span. We might never be able to monetize the beat reporter’s work.

But I strongly suspect if we stacked the decks fairly when it came to measuring “success,” if we calculated ROI over a longer term, the beat reporter would actually come out on top.