In 2004 and the beginning of 2005, the Contra Costa Times established its strategic plan for the future, built around the concept of hyper-local news. The 180,000-circ. newspaper (200-plus journalists), located east of San Francisco, would create a citizen-based site to emphasize unique-value local content, and then match that vision in print.

The hyper-local concept would allow the paper to establish the capability for citizen participation in its news creation. It would hold community meetings to recruit citizen journalists, then offer those citizen journalists training in order to create pro-am journalism projects. I know about it because I was one of the architects of the plan in my position as executive editor and vice president of news. Little did we know that Knight Ridder, our parent company, would soon be on the auction block, and the vision we created would be collecting dust.

Fast forward to November 2006, and the memo issued by Gannett CEO Craig Dubow. In it he calls for an emphasis on “local,local” content.

That’s another way to reference hyper-local news. Dubow, like Dean Singleton at Media News, knows that intensely local news is the salvation for newspapers. International news is a commodity that consumers of news can get anywhere, but local news is something newspapers can offer that others can’t. The more intense the local emphasis, and the more engaged with readers that newspapers can get both in print and on their web sites, the more success newspapers will have.

To Dubow’s credit, he issued a company-wide memo that layed out the game plan and established a time frame to transform Gannett’s newsrooms. Already, Gannett newspapers are heeding his call for hyper-local emphasis. The Advertiser, a Gannett Newspaper in Lafayette, Louisiana, features on its front page a segment called “Today’s Faces and Places” which directs readers to local news by section of the newspaper. It’s a very cool navigational device that allows the newspaper to highlight on A1 more local content.

The Argus Leader a Gannett paper in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, began running a police log. The editor of the paper, Randell Beck, says in a column that “deeply local content — whether it’s a police call to a house three blocks away or Aunt Thelma’s 90th birthday — is also personal content and stands near the core of how a good newspaper serves its community and region.”

Other Gannett newspapers are undergoing redesigns in order to highlight and emphasize new initiatives around the hyper-local theme. My wife is in the process of redesigning one Gannett paper and her focus is on how to showcase Dubow’s call for local,local news.

When the Contra Costa Times was forming its strategic plan more than two years ago, we took our cues from hyper-local web sites like Backfence, and Greensboro101, and studied the work of hyper-local web guru Rob Curley.

Although a paradigm shift, Curley’s work is nothing more than common sense. In one interview he says, “I’m old school. I think newspapers lost their way and started focusing on big investigative stuff and forgot to cover the prom or 10-year-olds playing baseball.”

The challenge newspapers face is getting their journalists to rally around an intensely local effort. To push forward you need CEOs like Dubow making it clear what the game plan is, and then editors at individual papers explaining that game plan at every turn.

Eventually roots take, journalists engage and newspapers remake themselves — hyper-local and engaged with their community.

Chris Lopez has been working in newsrooms since the age of 17, and over the past 28 years has covered a variety of beats from the National Football League to Denver City Hall.