It’s becoming a truism these days that “local” is the core value proposition for newspapers.

The reasoning goes like this: With tons of national and international news and other non-local content available free online, “local” is the one thing a local newspaper can do better than anyone else.

Which is true – but newspaper circulation keeps dropping, so apparently we’re not doing it well enough. Either we aren’t doing enough “local” or we’re not doing the right “local,” because more and more people are getting along fine without it.

So the multi-billion-dollar question for the newspaper industry seems to be, “What’s the right local content?”

But when you apply a “Newspaper Next” perspective to this challenge, you don’t start with the content – you start with the individual. You ask real people, “What are you trying to get done in your life? Which of those 'jobs' are important to you? Frequent? Frustrating?”

What’s exciting for newspaper companies is that most of the jobs people want or need to do in their lives require information, much of it local. If that’s our franchise, the opportunities are huge.

What’s disturbing for newspaper companies is that they’re currently gathering or supplying very little of that information. They do news, but local information is a lot more than that. It’s a huge opportunity space, but it’s largely untapped by newspapers or any competitor.

Just think about it: How often do you wish you knew where to buy something locally? What contractor, plumber, doctor, lawyer or mechanic you could trust? What you or your family could do on the weekend for fun? How to help with your daughter’s algebra assignment? What’s the best pizza joint, Thai restaurant, dry cleaner, etc.? Where the cool parties are? (Yes, much of this is age-dependent.) What’s a good elder care or child care solution? Whether there’s a traffic jam right now on the expressway home?

Turns out there’s a nearly infinite amount of valuable local information out there. Much of it is available for the asking. A lot of it is in the heads of ordinary people, derived from their own local experience and knowledge.

Via the Internet, it’s now possible to give people access to that information. But someone has to gather it and put it in usable form.

Years ago, I read that a company was sending teams of people around the United States to measure the exact latitude and longitude of road intersections. These data, it said, were critical for a new business opportunity – commercial GPS devices.

How interesting, I thought – the “information” had lain there for generations, and nobody considered it worth collecting. But once a technology arrived that could make it accessible and useful to millions of people, it suddenly became valuable. Now it has become a multi-billion-dollar business.

Similarly, every community is chock full of countless kinds of information, just waiting for someone to make it accessible. And the technology to make it accessible is now there, thanks to the Internet and its search, database, mapping, comparison, discussion/community and sorting functions.

As a result, local information WILL be unlocked and made accessible – the only questions are when and by whom? Google, Yahoo and other national players know it’s there, and they want to be the providers. But newspaper companies are in the best position to win the race, having more local resources, knowledge and information skills than any other competitor.

If we’re serious about building our franchises on local information, the opportunities are huge. But we have to start by defining “local information” the way the public does – and there isn’t a minute to waste.