There’s no such thing as a local website.

Think about it for a minute.

There are websites that publish CONTENT pertaining to a particular locality — but a local WEBsite is an oxymoron, because all websites exist on the WORLD WIDE web, i.e. any website can be accessed (barring censorship) anywhere in the world.

A local newspaper, in contrast, is only distributed in a limited geographic region. Before the web, if a local newspaper reported a story of national significance, there were two ways for that story to get national distribution:

1. A wire service distributed and/or rewrote the story
2. A national news brand re-reported (and/or rewrote) the story

That was the solution to the problem of physical distribution — but now, local news content published on the web by a local news brand can be accessed anywhere in the world.

And yet it isn’t — because now the distribution problem isn’t a physical limitation, but instead a problem with ATTENTION. There is no way for that story to get attention on the web outside of the audience who already visits the local news brand’s website because they know the brand locally.

But what if there were a way for a local story on a local news brand’s website to get national attention?

And what if there were a way to do it without the help of Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, AOL, New York Times, or any other national brand?

Well, there is way…

A local news brand’s content could get national attention on the web if every other local news brand linked to it on their websites.

Huh?

Let me take a step back to explain. I’ve been writing a lot about link journalism, a way that journalists can enhance their original reporting and even create a new type of original editorial content by linking to other content on the web.

Because journalists don’t link to anything, they are completely disenfranchised from the web’s link driven distribution system.

But what if journalists did start to link… to each other.

Bloggers have been doing this for years, which is why some top bloggers have better distribution on the web than many journalists.

Ryan Sholin has a list of top blogs that journalists should emulate in their effort to become web-native reporters — most of Ryan’s suggestions are masters of link blogging.

Now imagine if 1,000 newspapers where actively link blogging about issues of local importance — and linking to each other’s reporting on the same issues as part of their link journalism effort.

For example, take the killings at Northern Illinois University, a tragedy of national interest. This event happened in Rockford Register Star’s backyard, and they reported the story from a unique local perspective.

Now imagine if local news brands around the country, as part of their coverage, linked to Rockford’s reporting — and to reporting by the Daily Chronicle in Dekalb, and reporting from other Illinois papers.

If enough newspaper sites around the country did this, the original reporting by these local news brands could have effectively gotten national distribution.

Here’s a less dramatic example. Let’s say you’re a local journalist assigned to report on concerns about local water quality. A simple search on Google news reveals local stories on water quality from across the country, fodder for a great link journalism piece to complement original reporting on how the issue presents in your locality.

But the result would be that your link journalism drives traffic to other local sites — put another way, your journalism would contributing to the national distribution of the reporting by those other local journalists, on the issue of water quality.

It’s national distribution, using a distributed model, i.e. distributing content across hundreds of localities adds up to national distribution. (Yeah, it takes a while to wrap your brain around that.)

But not only is it national distribution, it’s content targeted distribution — you’re directing people interested in a topic to other content on that topic.

This is just scratching the surface, but here’s the key — local newspapers need to reinvent their business model. And the current business model is failing because it’s based on a shrinking distribution model.

So how do you reinvent the business model?

First you need to reinvent the distribution model.

(Shameless plug: Imagine if there were an easy way for journalists to share with each other links to their best reporting, and to vote up the best local reporting on issues of common interest, kind of a Digg for journalists, editors, and newsrooms, where they could combine the power of their links and create a new distribution network — then local news brands could really drive large quantities of traffic to each other’s reporting.)

But first lets look at how the concept of link journalism has been refined and supported:

From Josh Cantone at ReadWriteWeb:

The Drudge Report and other so-called link blogs, are really a subset of edited news aggregation, which has a great signal to noise ratio. Because the content is being vetted by an editor, readers can assume that they’re being directed only to relevant, non-redundant reporting (assuming they trust the editor). Link journalism is also something citizen journalists do a lot of, as when we share links via Google Reader like Robert Scoble, or via del.icio.us like Jemima Kiss. Bloggers and citizen journalists have long recognized the value of the link as a way to add context for readers and reinforce the points we make in our posts.

Mindy McAdams points to the example of Joshua Micah Marshall’s link journalism on Talking Points Memo, which recently receive a George Polk Award in journalism:

In providing links to diverse reports appearing in many different locations, TPM’s Marshall and his colleagues demonstrated the authority of their analysis that particular U.S. attorneys had been dismissed for political reasons.

Rather than relying on what Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel have famously criticized as the “journalism of assertion,” the new link journalism supplies evidence by backing up statements. Rather than making a phone call to a favorite and easy-to-reach expert or pundit, the journalist conducts research (imagine that!) and sources the facts by linking directly to them.

Jack Lail shares his own experience with link journalism:

I’ve been posting content that consisted of links to blogs for about a year and have for a long time included outbound links in stories. But those efforts are accelerating. I recently began experimenting with Karp on creating sets of links as content, some created by one person bookmaking relevant content and some as collaborative efforts of multiple bookmarkers.

The results are impressive. These outbound linking articles are strong traffic drivers because, I believe, they are providing a valuable, time-saving service to readers. On more than one day in the past week, a link “article” was the No. 1 “story” on the combined knoxnews/govolsxtra sites. And in the context of stories, they provide an additional rich layering of information.

All of these observations support the substantive journalistic value — and content value — of links in the context of a specific reporting effort, i.e. the link journalism equivalent of a news article.

But what’s the link journalism equivalent of the entire newspaper?

That’s were networked link journalism comes into play.

Networked link journalism is combining all the links created by journalists practicing link journalism to determine that most important, interesting, and newsworthy content that journalists are linking to.

In the simplest form of networked link journalism, one link = one vote. The stories with the most votes rise to the top.

This is the newspaper of the future — or rather the newspaper of today. This is how Google works, and how Digg works, by combining the power of many links.

What’s on a Google search results page? Or Digg’s homepage? A bunch of links.

But not just any links — the “best” links.

Why do some many people go to Google and Digg to click on those links? Why do they drive so much traffic on the web?

Because those links are determined by networks, not individuals — and networks are the most powerful force on the web.

An individual practicing link journalism can drive tens or, in the case of top link blogger/journalists, hundreds of visits for each link. The uber link journalists like Glenn Reynolds or Andrew Sullivan can drive a few thousand. Matt Drudge, the exception that proves the rule, can drive many thousands.

It’s all a matter of scale.

Journalists practicing link journalism in isolation can influence content distribution on the web (which most journalists are not doing at all), but only to a limited degree.

Journalists practicing networked link journalism, on the other hand, could have a huge influence over content distribution on the web — if enough journalists participated, they could drive enough traffic to crash servers.

We created Publish2 as a platform for networked link journalism, to give journalists and news organizations the power online that they once had offline — the power of distribution, the power of Google and Digg on the web — a power that, completely counter to the monopoly distribution model, journalism can only have collectively.

Remember the rule of networks on the web — the bigger the network, the more powerful it is.

There’s much more to this vision — such as a solution to the problem of rampant gaming that plagues Digg and Google, and the value of link journalism as content (as Jack has discovered) — but I want to see if the networked link journalism meme catches first. (If at first you don’t succeed, try another meme.)