Tom Grubisich in Online Journalism Review (highlighted as a feature story on this page) provides some needed perspective to counter the emergent conventional wisdom about hyper-local blogs replacing newspaper metro sections:

… The metros’ problem is they don’t know how to exploit their size. For all their cutbacks, surviving metros still have considerable staff and other resources that could be mobilized to do what sweat-equity blogs and micro-sites can’t do nearly as well or at all.

A story crying out for attention is what’s behind America’s broken health-care system.

Grubisich says newspaper metro newsrooms should leave it to sites like Yelp to cover restaurants and similarly “micro” local stories.  He suggests that newspapers should partner with those sites while using “their new playbook to cover… long-term stories with high social impact.”  I think Grubisich is right on the money.