Newsletter editor Kristen Hare said in the launch announcement that the idea behind Local Edition is to support the essential work that local news does by emphasizing improvements in local products and platforms and keeping on eye on what's ahead for the industry at the community level.

"My goal is to build a conversation week to week and month to month. I hope that together we’ll be able to identify what’s working, what’s not and what has to happen from the bottom up and the top down so that local news can remain both viable and valuable," Hare said in her inaugural post. 

The first edition brings in Kavita Kumar of the Minneapolis Star Tribune and Jason Rosenbaum of St. Louis Public Radio to discuss the angst in the industry and why Kumar and Rosenbaum are still journalists anyway.

Read the interviews with Kumar and Rosenbaum here.

Hare is requesting input from Poynter's readers, many of whom are working journalists, to drive the conversations and interviews with newsroom writers and bosses.  

Subscribe to Poynter's Local Edition here. 

Photo by Flickr user Renee with Creative Commons permissions.