Last year, Steven Johnson wrote about the Pothole Paradox and why it matters for local news. In a nutshell, it goes like this:

1. Say you’ve got a particularly nasty pothole on your street that you’ve been scraping the undercarriage of your car against for a year. When the town or city finally decides to fix the pothole, that event is genuinely news in your world. And it is news that you’ll never get from your local paper, or TV affiliate, or radio station.

Obviously this is a great opportunity for a site like outside.in, where news of pothole repairs might easily trickle up from neighborhood bloggers. But it’s not that simple, alas — there’s a flip side to the pothole paradox:

2. News about a pothole repair just five blocks from your street is the least interesting thing you could possibly imagine.

This morning around 12:30, gunshots woke up me. Listening at the window, we tried to piece together what happened, sirens came and went and the helicopters were out in full force. Finally, sleep came but this morning I tried to find out more what happened. I checked the Times and the Pasadena Star-News without any luck. Next it was on to Google News searched for 91016. I found an article on cbs2.com and then a post on Topix.

This is a prime example of the paradox. If I lived down the street or in Arcadia, this story wouldn’t be as much to me as the fact that I couldn’t get out of my house today because of the police tape. Working for a newspaper which is trying to get better with its local coverage, this is the challenge and the opportunity.