Benefits: Instead of a daily paper, four TV affiliates, two radio stations, an alt-weekly and various websites each devoting some percentage of their staff time to check police, fire, and emergency logs, listening to scanners, etc., you’d have one organization doing that for all of the outlets at a price that’s far less than what each organization would have paid to to staff those task itself. You could apply the same principles to any beat that is a “must” cover but seldom generates high-interest stories.

Essentially, you’re contracting out your “defensive coverage” (you cover it every day just to be relevant on the rare day that the beat generates a meaningful, high-interest story).

This lets each news org focus its energies on being whatever makes it different from the rest of the market. You would invest your staff time and budget only on those stories/projects that define your niche, your perspective, your identity.

Like a news wire, City News Bureau stories can be remixed by users. Republished, rebroadcast, rewritten — whatever. It’s the raw material of coverage that can now be expanded.

Another HUGE benefit? Newsrooms demand this kind of information, but don’t reward the people who generate it. They’re all trying to “move up” to doing other kinds of stories. Subscribing to a service like this one would let each news org clarify its mission and the roles of its reporters/editors, etc.