In all the stories about the many troubles of the American newspaper, from falling circulation to fleeing ad dollars, we read almost nothing about the rise of a new kind of local newspaper, the online-only local daily. But in fact they exist, and we can expect to be hearing more about them as more launch. Typically they’re funded and supported by local residents upset over cutbacks in the coverage of their cities by the existing dailies. One of the first of these, if not the first, went live nearly three years ago, VoiceofSanDiego.org, which publishes six days a week. A similar publication, MinnPost.com, is set to launch in Minneapolis, and yet another, St. Louis Platform, is about to launch in St. Louis. The aim of this new breed of newspaper is to cover the stories the print dailies are missing, or ignoring, and in the case of VoiceofSanDiego.org, there's a big emphasis on investigative journalism. Scott Lewis, executive editor of VoiceofSanDiego, talks to Media Life about his paper's mission, how its coverage is different, and the challenges of launching an online-only daily.

What are some of the challenges facing someone who's starting an online-only daily?

It's a new medium. Yes, people have been writing online for years, so there's nothing really new about journalism online.

But what we're doing is something wholly new. It's locally focused. Our project is an independent non-profit organization with a mandate from its founders to produce local journalism in response to the pullback and contraction of traditional newspapers.

Unlike traditional newspapers, we didn't start with content and then have to figure out how to put it online. We had to figure out how to make it look and work right online and also how best to produce content.

The biggest challenge is to develop a system. It's easy to produce great content for one day. What's hard is to do it six days a week, as we do.

We found journalists with not a lot of experience but with immense talent and, most importantly, hunger for good stories. In the past, at their level of experience, they might have been able to get jobs at major papers but they would have ended up covering staid, uninteresting issues.

We give them the most important stories and beats, and they have proven to both love the opportunity and work incredibly hard.

Is your site more responsive to citizens than newspapers have been in the past? It's no secret that print newspapers have never really been reader-driven.

I guess by reader-driven you'd mean that we make decisions based on what brings us the most readers. That's not necessarily the case. If you mean do we interact with readers and feature their thoughts and feedback prominently, absolutely.

We could cover a lot more sports and perhaps have more sensational lifestyle content that would drive more readers.

But we have a mission. We have more than 700 donors who have given us money to pursue that mission, and that's to cover local politics, local housing and education issues, along with the environment and public safety.

What we have noticed is that the better the stories we write about those issues, the more investigative, insightful and in-depth news we break, the more readers we have. So in effect we pursue the best stories knowing both that the effort will bring us more readers and that it will also fulfill our mission.

What's the viability of your web site in terms of news? Are you competitive and how, given your limited resources, compared with the local daily?

We break stories nearly every day that aren't covered in the major daily newspaper, the San Diego Union Tribune.

We don't pretend to be direct competitors with the Union-Tribune as an entire news-providing service. We do intend to compete, and compete quite well, with that paper on the issues we do cover.

We tell great stories and routinely publish investigative reports that scoop other papers.

We are able to compete, and part of the reason is cost. More than two-thirds of a traditional newspaper's costs are in printing and distribution. We spend only between 5 to 10 percent on actually getting the journalism distributed.

That means we're able to spend the rest of it on journalism. Also, as I said, we have intelligent, young, hungry journalists eager to prove themselves. We guide them well, I think, and we produce compelling stories.

We made a declaration early on that we'll never cover an issue we don't believe we can add something to. In other words, if we aren't breaking a story or writing a story that's better than what the local paper is doing, we're not going to do it. There's no point.

We will only succeed if we're producing stories that are better or new to people. We'll never, in the foreseeable future, replace the paper of record. But we've created a competitive media environment in daily news in San Diego that was lost when the Union-Tribune became the only major daily in town.

There are several online ventures like the one in Minnesota that have been launched recently or are planned. What makes online newspapers/news services increasingly popular?

Well, sure there are a lot of sites. But I only know of a couple that are locally focused, online-only news organizations producing professional stories for a specific audience.

Another one like ours, the St. Louis Platform, will launch soon. We consulted extensively on that project. Our online daily, VoiceOfSanDiego.org, the Platform, and MinnPost.com are a new breed. These are funded organizations that are hoping to be the new face of local journalism and the answer to the angst many people are feeling as they watch their local news sources wither.

There are two things that push this: Obviously the decline of the newspaper industry is one. But also the dynamic form of the new media.

What are your ad rates compared with local media?

Our rates are somewhere between a third and one half the price of similarly sized ads on KPBS.org

What's the one piece of advice that you could offer to folks out to set up similar online-only local news sites like yours? What have you learned in the past 2 1/2 years?

I think they will have to decide immediately what their focus is and what areas they can cover the best. There's a natural tendency to want to be all things to all people – to cover everything from politics, to food and entertainment.

To stand out, they should avoid trying to be a mile wide and only an inch deep in their coverage.

You can make a difference focusing on a niche – issues that have been neglected in the community – and doing the best work you can on those. That will earn you loyal readers much better than trying to cover things you can't give proper resources to.