As it is today, could the Sacramento Press replace The Sacramento Bee? In a word, no. However, one word is far from the full story.

In my last installment of this storyline, I outlined the course I was taking in discussing the future of news, with an emphasis paid to local content, since that is what this publication focuses on. Over the course of the last week, I embarked on the rather epic and tedious task of quantifying exactly what is in a week's worth of The Bee.

In order to do this, I purchased a copy each day and as meticulously as possible recorded how many pieces of content The Bee wrote versus content drawn from other publications, and of that content, how much of it was local. The full results of that survey can be found in the article posted previous to this one.

Overall, it is quite impressive how much content that a major daily can put together on any given day of the week. The Bee covers a wide range of subjects and a substantial geographic area. However, it has good days and it has bad days.

If you simply looked at a Monday paper, it would appear that in terms of sheer quantity, The Bee does not necessarily produce more local content than a publication the size of the Sacramento Press. Last Monday, The Bee produced approximately 16 original articles about our region. It produced another 11 about matters beyond the region and filled nearly 62% of its editorial space with content from other publications.

But Monday is far from the full picture, which is why I chose to dissect one week's worth of content and not just one day. On Tuesday, The Bee produced nearly double that many local original pieces, and on Friday nearly 40%, or 49 of 124 pieces, of The Bee was original local content.

If we were to lose that much content today, I think it would be a great loss to the community. However the numbers found in the survey I did are not impossible to achieve with a citizen journalism effort, whose base is the whole of the Sacramento region.

Much of what is reported locally is not muckraking, or in-depth investigative journalism. Much of it can be found in the crime logs and brief digests of events in the region. These are topics which citizen journalists can not only report with equal ability, but with greater interest and passion.

While I am humbled at the monumental effort it takes to put together The Bee every day, and admire the work that goes into it, I do not think it is a resource that is impossible to replicate.

This may even be more the case as of this week. That is because, as David Watts Barton reported here, many of the names I saw last week when compiling my survey will no longer be names I see in the paper, due to layoffs at The Bee. So perhaps last week’s effort is a bit of historical trivia. Time will tell, just as it will confirm my point of view or disprove it.

Please take a close look at the survey and let me know what you think of the results below.