By Barry Schaeffer

Ask any mergers-and-acquisitions guy what partnership means and he’ll tell you it’s a way of setting up a buy of your competition, to remove a nasty irritant, cut costs by increasing your economy of scale or move into a market where you’re under-represented. Whatever the spin, the upshot will be, "you don’t partner, you vanquish."

Ask most newspaper people the same question and you’re likely to get a blank stare. To be sure, there are good reasons why newspapers haven’t placed partnering high on their list of things to do; after all, local businesses aren’t partners, they’re advertisers, and other local media outlets aren’t partners, they’re competitors. As the venerable fourth estate, newspapers have always been studiously distant from goings on around them; it can be difficult to do a hard-hitting story about some outfit you’re playing "footsie" with.

But that was then and this is now, and newspapers confront a world that looks very different from the one in which they grew up. The advent of the Internet has meant that any dude in a garage anywhere in the world could come into town and set up shop to compete with any part of the newspapers’ market he finds attractive. Suddenly, newspapers are in a fight for their cultural place and financial life, and a few of the old rules may need rethinking. One of those changed rules concerns how newspapers define and approach partnering.

In today’s world, there are actually several good reasons for newspapers to consider partnering with organizations and businesses in their area. Let’s take a look at some of them:

As newspapers compete against the often well-heeled competitors from cyberspace, one weapon they bring to the table is identification with the local community. Where, after all, is Yahoo or "Everything-you-need.com", or any of the slick web-based offerings that seek to take over local markets? The answer is usually somewhere remote, both geographically and in commitment to the localities they invade. We know that readers and buyers like to deal with local folks, so newspapers have a powerful competitive draw, often unrecognized and untended. Partnering with local organizations can be an important way to demonstrate and strengthen that "localness." Interestingly, other media have discovered the value of getting out into the community and becoming part of the local scene. Radio stations, for example, think nothing of doing remotes from the nearby auto dealer or convenience store or new library, giving away hot dogs, tee shirts or what-have-you. But newspapers, for the most part, have viewed this kind of local activity slightly beneath them. The time has come to rethink that position. Newspapers will find a ready group of local businesses and non-profit organizations anxious to enter into all manner of co-operative ventures, either to boost their own visibility or for other more altruistic reasons. Carefully chosen, such ventures can cement the newspaper’s position as "one of us."

While the online edition can get much of its national and global content from news services, it must deliver local content often available only through local reporting. This can be very difficult given the fact that online newspapers are virtually always starved for reporting staff, an unfortunate artifact of being the new kid on the block in an old industry. Partnering can be a partial answer to this dilemma. In every community, there are groups and organizations that monitor and create content in specific areas, much of it worthy of inclusion in an online edition’s local sections. Whether it’s the local health consortium, local political groups, or retail industry players who keep track of openings and special deals available to local buyers, the online edition can build a steady flow of potential content by establishing loose partnerships with these groups. Many local groups are already on the Web, providing opportunities for cross linking and even limited framing among partner sites. While caution is always the watchword in such endeavors, the benefits of a prudent partnering programming can far outweigh the risks.

I mention content sharing with other media outlets last because it is a subject that evokes strong feelings on the part of many newspaper people. Why trade with the enemy, even if they are local? The answer, in part, is that everyone’s in the same boat. Local broadcast media, especially TV outlets, are facing similar competition from cable and internet-based audio broadcasting. Under the right circumstances, story sharing can be valuable to local media outlets by expanding their reporting reach and helping to reinforce the sense of localness mentioned earlier in this column. Most good online newspapers know that radio and TV news departments often monitor their sites for an easy heads up on breaking stories, so why not bring some mutual benefit to an essentially one-way process.

The major portal sites like Yahoo and Excite are realizing that they must localize their offerings to be successful in many markets. While some have decided to build their own local content, many are finding it easier to work with local outlets to create the sense of "my hometown portal site." This provides an important opportunity for local online news organizations to set up favorable partnering arrangements with the big guys, protecting their own turf and branding while encouraging their global competitors not to spend the time and effort of building or acquiring a local presence. If this sounds like lying down with the lions, it probably it, but what’s the alternative for the online newspaper. The major portal sites have the resources to move into town if they wish, and they have little or no respect for the importance of a healthy local news outlet.

The overriding concept driving this column and the growing awareness of partnering in newspaper ranks is simple. The best defense against those guys from out of town is a well-developed fabric of local relationships among newspapers, broadcast media, business, non-profit and even governmental organizations. Newspapers have status and resources that all of these groups want and can use, giving the online edition a powerful resource in setting up and controlling the interaction. In the face of such local arrangements, even the Yahoos of the world may be more likely to negotiate than confront for local presence.