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sligochampion.ie No news is too local for the Sligo (Ireland) Champion.

Given the international makeup of this blog and its resulting worldliness, I wouldn't pretend to be an expert on what makes media work and not work in countries other than the U.S. However, the print media is struggling to find its cross-platform way in the United States -- and a week in Ireland followed by this week in London has re-emphasized some important lessons for me.

Why do people pick up the local newspaper? Oops! I just gave away the answer: Because it's LOCAL. When the local newspaper does a better job covering its own backyard (in Rob Curley terms, "overkill"), then the newspaper sells, business is good, and journalists keep their jobs.

That was abundantly clear to me in Sligo, where I had the pleasure of spending an afternoon with Seamus Finn. More than three decades ago, Finn says he was, at 24, the youngest-ever editor ever of the weekly Sligo Champion.

According to Finn, Sligo's population is about 23,000, with about 39,000 residents in the surrounding area. The Champion publishes more than 30,000 copies of the weekly paper, many mailed to the U.S. Finn and I talked about an online strategy to better serve those foreign readers and how he might make up for any lost revenue -- obviously a concern for him.

That paper is remarkably local -- the cows on the farms must read it because even they are well covered! But so is The Kerryman -- another daily paper that serves County Kerry. Small-town paper? That didn't keep it from providing 13 pages of advance coverage Sunday of the Gaelic football Munster championship between Kerry and Cork (won, to my hosts' great pleasure, by Kerry by the odd score of 1-15 to 1-13). Names and faces make news, especially in an area where everyone knows each other dating back generations if not centuries.

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Americans are more transient, of course. Still, understanding communities (whatever they may be) is the secret to deeper penetration no matter what the platform.

Coming to London, where I attended Wimbledon Wednesday and where I will see the start of the Tour de France Saturday (prologue) and Sunday (Stage 1 begins at the Tower Bridge in London), I got a strong sense of the competition that exists between papers at every Underground station.

There are two free evening newspapers to contend with (hawkers literally shove them at you). However, it's obvious what sells here: sex, scandal and the unusual (the same can be said of the larger Irish newspapers). It reminds me of the American penny press of the 1830s and, of course, of today's scandal sheets. But London commuters can't seem to get enough of it, and the Tube cars are littered with the papers.

On my delayed Tube ride back from Wimbledon on Wednesday I read a fascinating, if cynical, Evening Standard column on the media by Roy Greenslade headlined "If Murdoch wins the Journal, he'll call the tune" (online access for subscribers only).

He wrote: "The idea that there is a wall between the commercial side and the editorial side is nonsense. That has been obvious to journalists in Britain for a long time, but their stateside colleagues are just catching up. American journalists are in denial. Most cannot bring themselves to admit the new reality while others, though recognizing it, are lashing out wildly at its effects. That is the underlying reason for the scorn directed at Murdoch. What journalists there have to grasp, as do many over here, is that there are only four reasons for newspaper ownership: profit, propaganda, prestige and public service."

These are some of the lessons of my trip overseas: Think local. Sex it up. And get out of denial. Do I buy them all? Mostly, I fully buy into local, local, local. Always have, always will. As for the other two, well, American journalists may be in need of a psychologist!