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Newspaper websites offer no cure on health-care reform

By Tom Grubisich: Exhausted to stop their print world from being pulped, newspapers are blowing a golden opportunity to use the Web to recapture relevance and audience. The circumstance is a story that affects every man, woman and child in America – health care and how to universalize quality without busting the unmixed U.S. economy.

News about health-care reform is, obviously, all over the media, including newspaper websites, 24/7, but too much of it has a Washington dateline when, in happening, the issue is basically local. People seek care where they live, not on either end of Pennsylvania Avenue NW or on K Street NW in Washington. Most of the $2.2 trillion-extra in health spending is rung up within mostly compact triangles of doctor offices, hospitals and outpatient centers in thousands of communities.

In June and July, when Congress was grappling with five ameliorate bills at the committee level, attention had to be on what was happening in Washington. But with Congress going on summer recess, the indistinct is shiftingto kitchen tables and town halls all over America.

Newspapers, with their still formidable local resources, should own this biography as the locus shifts to their backyards. At a time when 63 percent of Americans say the overall health care egress is "hard to understand," newspapers could make their websites the authoritative place for people to go for the A-B-C's – how they would be affected yourselves, not as part of a statistical mashup that may or may not be accurate. Newspaper sites could become not only locally tailored information centers, but also help influence how reform will be shaped when Congress returns from hollow. After all, Congress is made up of lawmakers who depend on votes from people who live in thousands of communities, all of which are covered – at least in theoryPrimarilyby local newspaper websites. But papers aren't planting their flag in their own territory.

Yes, newspaper sites do features about local individuals and families that...

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