Ten Newspapers Who Do It Right

Here is an excerpt from a long article on 10 newspapers who are "doing it right." To read the entire article, click here.

10 Newspapers that Do It Right

By: Kristina Ackermann and Deena Higgs Nenad

Published: March 15, 2011

When we set out to feature 10 newspapers that "do it right," we didn't quite realize the magnitude of the project we were undertaking. That's not to say we thought that selecting 10 newspapers from a sea of thousands would be easy, we just underestimated the number of truly noteworthy ideas we would end up sorting through. Never mind the fact that we neglected to define what "it" was and what our criteria for doing it "right" would be.

We asked you for the best you've got - your brightest "a-ha!" moments and your most successful "we may as well try" endeavors - and you, dear readers, delivered the goods. We were amazed at the creativity and innovation demonstrated by newspapers small and large, daily and weekly, free and subscription-based. It quickly became apparent that we would be doing you a disservice if we only featured 10 newspapers, so we modified our strategy.

There were a handful of papers that stood out as obvious candidates: They had several areas of innovation that produced measurable results. Some of them were so excited to tell us about their projects that their submissions started to rival War and Peace (I'm looking at you, Times of Northwest Indiana). Other papers took a more focused route and stuck to one or two things they do expertly, such as hyperlocal content or coverage of high school sports. There was a lot of overlap among this second group - believe it or not, there's more than one newspaper that copied Groupon and launched a daily coupon program.