Local TV isn't likely to expand coverage beyond the items typically reported on during daily broadcasts. In the mean time the kind of local and hyperlocal coverage traditionally handled by print media journalists is going to be largely absent, which will in turn reduce the amount of grist for the blogosphere.
Some believe that bloggers will pick up the slack (and possibly even improve coverage) when newspapers drop off. Having worked for the 2nd largest newspaper company in North America for a couple years now I'm unconvinced. Simply put quality journalism (as opposed to editorializing) requires a tremendous amount of time and effort to pull off, and is very expensive.
i largely agree with you that on-ground reporting is important for accuracy of the news item. But on the other hand how important accuracy is as compared to frequent updates by users. For instance reporting of a sports score or traffic jam on a highway by a user through his cell phone is still quite useful for people.
If an online site emerges that gains traffic from a city audience, do you think local service providers like pizza, restaurants or plumbers will advertise on it.
Just about every major media outlet is currently experimenting with various approaches to fusing high-quality journalistic content with high-quality user contributed content. This can range from simplistic story commenting implementations to more involved user review & ratings systems. I believe that this is the future (if one exists) for print media outlets.
As to hyper-local advertising, there is definitely a market here. I've seen several instances where local community sites have (very) successfully monetized through a combination of local service provider ads and ad network positions.
Exponentially? Not that I'm aware of. I've seen examples of highly focused niche sites that have generated nontrivial (and growing) ad revenue, but so far nothing viral. And really this touches on one of the key problems in the newspaper world today: editors who are looking for the next Big Thing to replace the classifieds cash cow. I believe tremendous resources are being squandered on what is basically a waste of time. If there was one overarching business model that was going to "save" newspapers, someone would have struck on it by now and everyone would be following suit. The future (again if one exists) is in many carefully managed small revenue streams.
From the discussion here emerges another question. Is professional content creation out of date? Do users appreciate professional content so much that they are willing to be inconvenienced in terms of money or time to acquire it?
The guys over at the New York Times sure seem to thing so. They've been beating the "switch to paid subscription models online" drum pretty hard recently. The real differentiator is absolute top-shelf content. As far as I can tell (and my own surfing habits reflect this so I may have a personal bias) most folks don't much care where they get their content from as long as it's thoughtful, well-written and at least bears the appears of solid fact-checking. YMMV. The one thing that I think everyone in the industry agrees on is the kind of vanilla content that's coming off the wire these days is absolutely insufficient to attract users to an online portal. That crap is a commodity freely available on any number of aggregator sites.
Some believe that bloggers will pick up the slack (and possibly even improve coverage) when newspapers drop off. Having worked for the 2nd largest newspaper company in North America for a couple years now I'm unconvinced. Simply put quality journalism (as opposed to editorializing) requires a tremendous amount of time and effort to pull off, and is very expensive.