A recent essay by media watcher Howard Owens is focused on how locally owned news sites can compete against AOL’s growing Patch network of hyperlocal sites. But much of his argument can also be applied to “CJ” outlets that are not in competition with Patch.

Owens writes: “Of course, the biggest weakness Patch has is Patch isn’t you. You are truly local. Your business is based in the community you cover, not New York. You need to be sure your advertisers and readers know this. … If you’re going to be beat Patch, you need to be all about local and only local. And beat that drum as loudly and as often as you can. It will never hurt to remind local business owners that Patch is based in New York, that revenue is siphoned out of town, and that you’re the local guy who will always be there.”

That’s not a new idea by any stretch. Henry Beetle Hough made a similar point in his 1940 memoir, “Country Editor.” UNC journalism professor Ken Byerly also discussed that issue in his foundational 1960 textbook, “Community Journalism.” The local Athens News makes the point often in its house ads, noting that it is a “locally owned” newspaper. So do locally owned community news media everywhere.

What’s different now is that big media companies see dollar signs in “them thar hills,” primarily affluent suburbs and prospering small towns with good Internet access (such as college towns). The operating costs for online-only media are much lower than for traditional print and broadcast media. Production costs are minimal (no paper, no presses, no transmitters, no FCC licenses … .)

Yet traditional media still must produce their “classic” versions alongside their online offerings. But it may be smart to set up a different business structure, including a dedicated person or two, to focus just on the online side. That way, if (or when) Patch or something similar comes to town, the established local news organization will be ahead of the game, and established as the trusted source for local news — and the best venue for local advertisers.

This push of a major media company into the ‘local news’ market is not a new phenomena. In his memoir ‘Country Editor,’ Henry Beetle Hough made note of an effort in the mid-20th century of a regional daily newspaper to try to tap into the market of Hough’s weekly paper on Martha’s Vinyard:

‘This daily believed that a familiar formula could be applied, that it was only necessary to print names, names, names, in order to enjoy circulation and the respect of readers,’ Hough wrote. ‘The truth was that the traditional formula was idle and silly. The thing which makes people in small towns read their papers is news, and they have no interest whatever in names — even their own — which do not mean something at the time and in the context of town life.’

In the journalistic wastelands of suburban America, few communities have any dependable coverage of local news beyond, perhaps, token efforts by the satellite weeklies owned by the major metro daily. Yet the suburbs are where we find the box stores, chain restaurants, and strip malls where local niche businesses cling to life. Although advertising is a declining source of revenue for newspaper companies, and ‘up-priced’ circulation is providing some gains, advertising is still the biggest contributor to revenue streams, according to a report from the Nieman Journalism Lab.

Patch.com appears to have found a new formula: A media behemoth producing actual community journalism. Early reports claim that the hours are long and the pay scale middling, but since when has that not been the case at most media jobs? One Patch editor told Business Insider, ‘There are aspects of the job that suck — and I’ll be right there with your tipster trying to improve them — but at the heart of it, Patch is bringing serious journalism to settings that haven’t always enjoyed it. … At least in my region, middle and upper management rarely weigh in on individual stories; their influence is far more process-oriented. In many ways, it resembles a federation of small-town editors-in-chief.’

Which raises the specter of ‘ownership’ in the community journalism sector. Too many scholars and media critics equate corporate ownership with content control at the local level. Some large companies do pull too many strings at the local level, but most do not; they understand that for their local properties to be successful, they have to have a great deal of editorial autonomy. AOL appears to have figured that out, too, with Patch.

I’m not sure how well Patch could compete with a good, independently owned local news site. But I’ll be watching that angle closely.

For now, I think legacy media, particularly community journalism operations in suburbs and satellite cities, would do well to view Patch as having a good idea that could pay off in the long run. Existing community news media — which already have boots on the ground and at least some cultural capital by already having a local identity — should invest more into covering their backyards. More staff. More titles. More special projects. More coverage of truly ‘local’ news that is, as Hough advised, ‘in the context of town life.’

Media watcher Richard Brenneman summed up the story this way: “Not only did the [salaries] raise enough community ire to force the resignations of City Manager Robert Rizzo [salary $787,637], Police Chief Randy Adams [$457,000], and Assistant City Manager Angela Spaccia [$376,288], but the city councilmembers also voted to cut back their own salaries, which averaged bearly $100,000 — insane for a city of fewer than 40,000 residents.”

It appears that shortly after the Community News was sold and stopped covering local government routinely, city officials began paying themselves salaries in the high six-figures, more than 10 times the going rate in nearby communities. The corruption appears to have gone unchecked because there was no local watchdog journalism.

In my own experience as a community-news reporter, I can tell you that corruption at the local level is very real, and sometimes very expensive for cash-strapped small towns. Within a few years of starting my career, I uncovered shady business dealings by rural township officials, county planning officials, and other local agencies. Some of those were minor mistakes that bent rather than broke laws, and amounted to little more than local officials shuffling the public’s business to their friends who, in the end, delivered the goods as needed. But in some cases, the corruption was crass and selfish, and not at all in the public’s interest. Years later, I was part of a team of journalists who uncovered and reported similar local sweetheart deals involving a powerful U.S. congressman; he resigned shortly thereafter while under ethics charges in the House.

Revealing corruption at the local level is certainly an important job of journalism, but more important is the role of community journalism to deter corruption in the first place. If a local news medium covers every city council meeting, every county planning meeting, every school board meeting, and so on, they will see sweetheart deals and salary inflation coming, and can make those issues public before they are enacted. Sometimes, a reporter (who may be the only person sitting in the audience at such a meeting) can simply ask, “Aren’t those salaries kind of high compared to other communities?,” and the corruption can get nipped in the bud.

Journalists who cover communities certainly should pursue the “big stories,” but never forget that consistent coverage of the routine dealings of local government is the true public service. After several years of no routine local coverage of government, the people of Bell are out millions of dollars; it will take expensive legal and court fees to recover even some of the funds, and the community is now facing a lot of cultural turmoil and mistrust that could take years or more to correct.

It’s a great story for a journalist who wants to break “the big story,” but wouldn’t Bell be better off if a watchdog had been covering the meetings held years ago where those big salaries were being discussed and voted on?

Journalism students and working journalists often groan when assigned to cover city hall and school boards. Having covered hundreds of such meetings myself, I understand their dread — many meetings are focused on routine business, petty squabbles over minor issues, and small adjustments to local policy that are proposed and debated over months or even years. I once witnessed a half-hour debate over whether the township should buy a new tire, or a less-expensive retread, for its one dump truck. Simply put, such meetings are often boring.

They also are the bread and butter of community journalism. Because I was there every month to listen to the township supervisors debate minor issues, I also was there when they had to discuss more controversial issues such as whether to grant zoning variances for a friend of theirs (and that was the only legitimate basis for the variance).

Such routine coverage is the single best service journalists can provide to a community, whether the community realizes it or not. In Bell, the watchdog journalism was too little, and much too late.

Part of the conference is an awards banquet, and this year’s Eugene Cervi Award for outstanding service went to the Gish family of Whitesburg, Ky., and their weekly newspaper, The Mountain Eagle.

In community-journalism circles, The Mountain Eagle is a bit of a legend. Tom and Pat Gish bought the paper in 1956, and over several decades they took on local corruption and crusaded for their community, all the while facing death threats, harassment, thefts, even arson. They took on big issues, too, such as the powerful strip-mining industry in their part of the Appalachians.

When they took over the Mountain Eagle, they changed the newspaper’s motto to “It Screams!” When the newspaper office was firebombed in 1974, the Gishes published from their home under a new motto. “It Still Screams!” The newspaper still publishes its blend of solid local coverage with principled crusading, under the management of the Gishes’ son, Ben.

The Gishes are not alone in being modern-day examples of courageous community journalists, but with that comes consequences that Pulitzer-seeking major dailies don’t experience. Al Cross of the University of Kentucky, who directs the Institute for Rural Journalism and Community Issues, put it this way: “It is more difficult to practice ethical, hard-nosed journalism in smaller communities than it is in big cities. We all know the reasons: personal connections, organizational obligations, business pressures and so on. But if community journalism is to be more than the red-headed stepchild of our craft, if it is to fulfill the promise of the First Amendment for its readers, viewers and listeners, courage is essential.”

Journalism professor Judy Muller of the Annenberg School at USC recently told the Texas Panhandle Press Association, “You live next to the people you write about, and that takes tremendous courage, to report the truth.”

Many times, journalism students are put off by the idea of “community journalism” because they believe it to be “boring” and of little consequence. When I tell students about ‘the little papers that could,’ most of them become inspired. But the discussion of the basic courage it takes to do basic journalism at the community level often is harder to explain.

One poignant example, however, comes from Mary Lou Montgomery, editor of the Courier-Post in Hannibal, Missouri, who visited the E.W. Scripps School of Journalism a few years ago to talk to students and faculty about her experiences in community newspapering. One account she told was of a fatal vehicle crash involving a car and a school bus; the driver of the car died. He also happened to be the son of a local dentist—Montgomery’s dentist. Mary Lou’s account of the anguish she felt for the man “who gave my little girls their smiles,” as well as the whole family, was balanced by her professional obligation to cover the event because it was, indeed, serious local news.

“I think it is important NOT to separate the person from the situation,’ Montgomery recently explained to me in an e-mail. “When the first call came over the scanner that there was an injury accident between a school bus and a vehicle, our textbook journalist training went into place. School bus. Injury. Accident. Check.

“It was only later that I learned that the victim, my dentist’s son, had been killed.

“Did that change the story? It shouldn’t have. Every accident involves somebody. Somebody is suffering. Somebody is hurt.

“Instead of focusing on steel vs. steel, we now try to focus on the human element; the emotions of all involved.

“The military dehumanizes soldiers when reporting fatalities: Three ‘troops’ killed today.

“Journalists shouldn’t follow suit. One person lost from a community is a loss to the community as a whole.”

The personal connections journalists have with their communities are real and often powerful, and are tested on a regular basis simply because much of what is “news” is not at all happy. It is easy for a correspondent from a major news outfit to drop into a small town to cover a mine collapse or a flood, but when she reports her story and flies off to the next assignment, that relationship essentially ends. The journalists who live in the community must face the people they write about. For the community journalist, simply going to work each day can be a monumental act of courage.

In nearly all of he media coverage of the run-up to Murdoch’s eventual purchase of the WSJ and its subsidiaries, the emphasis from media watchers, media scholars, and industry leaders was “what will happen to the Wall Street Journal”? Of almost no interest was “What will happen to the Ottaway Newspapers,” about two dozen community newspapers that were owned by Dow Jones and also up for sale. One of the few articles about the Ottaway papers, in the Boston Globe, quoted Murdoch as dismissing them as “those silly little Ottaway papers.”

The truth was, those “silly little papers” were immensely profitable for Dow Jones. The year before the sale, they collectively made $48.2 million from $252.2 million in revenue, a profit of nearly 20 percent. That same year, the WSJ group (including the WSJ and Barron’s magazine) made just $33.9 million on more than $1 billion in revenue, barely 3 percent in profits.

Those “silly little papers” also tended to do pretty good journalism. Many of them were regular recipients of awards from their state press associations, but also provide the only source of dependable local news for their communities.

From a purely economic standpoint, community media (especially community newspapers) are a very large and significant part of the journalism industry. At the local level, they provide effective and affordable venues for local advertisers (who also happen to be members of the community).

They also dominate in terms of total eyeballs. For example, in the U.S. newspaper industry, the most recent comparison (from 2004) showed that 97 percent of all newspapers listed the Editor & Publisher yearbook were “small” (circulations below 50,000). The 9,100 “small” newspapers had a combined circulation of 108.9 million; the 217 major metro dailies had combined circulations of 38.2 million. There is crossover, of course — many people read a major daily in their region (or one of the “national” papers, such as the WSJ or USAToday) as well as their community papers.

From a journalism education standpoint, we journalism professors also know full well that most of our students rely on community media for their first jobs out of college, and that most of our alumni work at community media. Community media vastly outnumber the “marquee” media with national reputations, and a look at the job listings shows that while those marquee media outlets are laying off veterans in droves, community media are still hiring.

And, finally, as journalists and journalism scholars, we have to remember that what we consider “significant” is so much ivory tower hubris. It’s what the public considers significant that matters. And in the Boston Globe’s lone article about the Ottaway papers being sold, this comment from a small-town business owner pretty much represents what the public wants:

“‘Certainly we’re all talking about it, and we’re all concerned about it,’ said Peter T. Kavanaugh, the president of La-Z-Boy Furniture Galleries of Dartmouth, a longtime advertiser in the Standard-Times. ‘The Ottaway papers tend to be local papers. They’re not centralized. If any of these papers were to lose that local flavor, the readership would plunge. And that would create a void for the local advertisers.’

An example of a local story that did make national news is the infamous “Jena 6” story a few years ago in Jena, Louisiana, involving racial tensions, intimidation, and violence at the local high school. Once the story “went national,” the issue of racial tensions in tiny Jena (pop. about 3,000) was featured in such prominent media as National Public Radio and the BBC. A march in September 2007 by about 20,000 people put even more attention on the small town in central Louisiana.

The most recent issue of SPJ’s Quill magazine puts the spotlight on the problems two local journalists faced in covering the issue for their communities. The accounts of those two young reporters – one for a local newspaper, the other for a local TV station – provide a small glimpse of the issues community journalists can face when locally bad news makes national headlines.

Among some of the problems they faced: National network news stations use video from the local station but don’t give credit; national reporters pumping local reporters for info while the local reporters were trying to do their own jobs; and bitter resentment toward “the media” in the little town where those local reporters have to work. One reporter claims to have received death threats, dead animals placed in her car, and a noose hung from her door.

That one case illustrates an important dynamic in the relationships between the vast majority of professional journalists who work for community media and the high-profile minority who work for national media. Large media are prone to “parachute journalism,” in which they swarm to small communities to cover newsworthy incidents only for a short time, giving those journalists little or no way to develop rapport within the community. Local media are the exact opposite — they have established rapport in their communities, and large-scale, newsworthy events can cause serious strains on reporters’ relationships with the community. Then, after the national media pull out, any poor behavior by national journalists remains in the community’s memory, resulting in resentment and hostility that is often transferred to the local journalists.

It’s always a good idea for journalists of all stripes to tread lightly into new territory, but national journalists would do well to be much more concerned about how their actions can affect their peers working in community media.

• First, community journalism is journalism that privileges community values over professional values. That is, community journalists are sensitive (but not necessarily deferential) to the wants and needs of the communities they serve. That affects everything from news judgment (what is or is not worth covering) to making tough ethical decisions (about publishing information that would be embarrassing to people who live in the community).

• Second, community journalism respects, and provides, what is generally called “micronews” — the minutia of community life. Examples include: bowling-league scores, elementary-school cafeteria menus, activities at senior-citizen centers, Honor Roll listings, and so on. Although not at all glamorous from a journalism standpoint, such information is very useful to members of communities, and community media would be foolish not to be the most trusted source for such information.

• Third, community journalism is generally quite personal. Whereas an MSM reporter might spend a few hours interviewing a person and never talk to that person again, a community journalist is likely to run into the people she or he writes about (particularly in small towns). That can be both intimidating and helpful; intimidating because community journalists have little insulation from sources who are angry about how they are portrayed in news stories, but helpful in that it encourages reporters to be much more sensitive about how they treat sources.

The above traits are common to all community media, from small-town newspapers to Web sites that serve virtual communities spanning the globe.

They’re wrong.

‘Community journalism’ as a distinct branch of the journalism industry is at least 50 years old, stemming back to a course (and textbook) of that name taught by Kenneth R. Byerly at UNC-Chapel Hill in the 1950s. But in practice, community journalism goes back much, much farther — in fact, an argument could be made that community journalism is as old as journalism itself.

Which begs the question, “What is ‘community journalism,’ anyway’”?

As several journalism scholars define it, community journalism is journalism that serves distinct communities, typically small towns, suburbs, or urban neighborhoods, but also communities of identity (ethnic communities, or GLBT communities, etc.), of avocation (farmers, dentists, firefighters), or of short-term goals (i.e., special interest groups). Generally, these communities are “small” in some sense, and have certain aspects that set them apart from larger populations. The news media that serve those communities also tend to be small, but more importantly, the journalists who produce those media tend to have fairly strong connections to the communities they serve.

That is very different from, for example, the largest daily newspaper in a major city, or a national television or radio news network. Those media may have more prestige, popularity, and influence in the regional and national arenas, but at the community level, they have very little effect. Even a poorly edited small-town weekly newspaper can have a tremendous impact on community life in a small town than can CNN or USAToday.

When it comes to numbers, “CJ” clearly and unambiguously dominates the industry. In the U.S. alone, for example, about 97 percent of all newspapers are classified as “community” newspapers, or newspapers with circulations below 50,000. Most are not dailies, but weeklies, twice weeklies, etc. All together, those newspapers have a combined circulation of nearly 109 million, about three times as much as the combined circulation of the 220-or-so daily newspapers with circulations above 50,000. That’s why we call community journalism “the bottom of the iceberg” — it may not be the part of the industry that gets much attention, but it is by far the biggest part of the industry.

That is not to say “CJ” is either better or worse than metropolitan, regional, or national/global journalism. Rather, the “two journalisms” have different goals, different obligations, different strengths, and different limitations.

The biggest difference between community journalism and so-called “mainstream journalism” is point of view.

Applied against U.S. Censure Bureau data, that means about 47.25 million American adults do not use the Internet.

What’s interesting is that we appear to have reached a point at which the digital divide in the U.S. is a matter of choice rather than a matter of access. Many people can get reliable Internet service in their homes, but choose not to. According to the Pew study, a third of offline Americans have no interest in the Internet, compared to a tenth who think it is too expensive.

Where do offline Americans get their local news? The Pew project didn’t go there. But the National Newspaper Association’s most recent readership study found that 81 percent of those surveyed are regular readers of their local newspapers. They share their physical newspapers with more than two other people, on average. And 30 percent of community-newspaper readers do not have Internet access in their homes.

I am not a romantic about newsprint. I recognize that ‘dead tree’ journalism is expensive, dirty, wasteful … and stubborn. Online communication is superior in so many ways, not the least of which being its minimal environmental impact compared to print’s ginormous carbon footprint. Yet ink-on-paper publishing remains a strong part of the community journalism sector, and should remain a part (though certainly not the emphasis) of journalism education.

That’s often a hard sell on college campuses, where high-speed online communication is very much the norm, and online publishing provides an easy, versatile, and far-less-expensive platform for producing student work than print and broadcast. But as we train the next generation of journalists, we should not let our focus on the online world overshadow the fact that the offline population numbers in the tens of millions.

It’s hard to tell when the population wedge marked “offline” will shrink to insignificance. For now, we must operate knowing that millions of Americans still get most of their local news from wads of paper delivered to their porches or plastic tubes at the ends of their driveways. Teaching students to produce “print” journalism is not a matter of clinging to the past or fearing the future, as some might argue, but of being realistic about the present.

That may be a good move financially, as prep sports are a big deal in American culture and represents one of the most important sectors of coverage for community-focused media. But removing prep sports from the context of the whole community may be the achilles heel of the idea. The cultural capital of prep sports is directly connected to the broader context of the community; the role of prep sports in community life is diminished when it is not presented alongside coverage of other community news and information.

Community newspapers and local radio stations often provide breadth and depth not found in other media, even relatively small regional media outlets. That is because many community media serve small geographic regions with only a handful of local institutions, such as high schools. Some community media cover a single school district.

As such, community media tend to cover more than just the major high school sports (in the U.S., that’s football and basketball). Tennis, golf, field hockey, soccer, and many other “minor” sports often get star treatment in local sports pages. That’s the breadth.

The depth is found in how much local high school sports are covered — not just game stories of prep sports, but game previews, athlete profiles, analysis columns, off-season features, etc.

Done well, community journalism provides such depth and breadth to the coverage of many other aspects of community life, including local government, local culture, and local issues. What results is a rich and complex image of community life, and a means for people to engage in that life on a regular basis.

Isolating one aspect from that broad context, such as having a site devoted just to local high-school sports, diminishes its role in community life. It also can fragment the community according to constituents’ preferred topics of interest.

That raises some important practical implications. Sports coverage tends to attract a lot of local advertising, and the revenue can underwrite coverage of less-attractive topics such as local government.

There also is a philosophical aspect, tied to the role of community journalism in a democratic society: If prep-sports fans can get all of their news about a local team from a sports-centered site, will they even bother to scan headlines for news about local government (including the school boards that make many decisions affecting high-school sports)?

Prep sports is a vital and important part of life in many communities, and often is directly tied to civic involvement and civic pride. Isolating that from other community issues will be detrimental to both, I believe.