Yesterday, Gannett’s Tennessean newspaper launched a local blog directory called On Nashville. It’s a work in progress as they figure out who is going to author the posts and what the site will offer local bloggers.

In OnNashville’s last post authored two days ago, the Tennessean’s Knight Stivender ended her thoughts with “R.I.P. Nashville is Talk­ing. We’ll miss you,” a reference to a local pioneering aggregator blog, Nashville Is Talking (NIT). WKRN-TV shut the site down after I left to pursue opportunity in digital media.

The effort by mostly print and broadcast to figure out how best to harness the power of local blogs seems to languish in experiment mode as legacy media resources shift to triage a dying industrial-aged distribution model for news and information. Blogs have long urged legacy media for the better part of the past decade to pay attention to the dramatic shift in the way people prefer receiving news and information. The message seems to have arrived on the desks at the top ten years too late.

None the less, the experiments continue. Last year, KOMO-TV partnered with Datasphere to create what they called “hyperlocal neighborhood websites.”

Curiously, Datasphere doesn’t link to examples of their own work at KOMO or elsewhere. On my last visit to see how they were doing at KOMO, all I saw were sparse postings by KOMO staff and AP on “hyperlocal neighborhood websites” that simply listed links to local blogs.

And here lies one of the problems. When legacy media focuses solely on how to, as Datasphere puts it, “get the most from online opportunities, helping them to develop new markets and generate maximum return from their investment in content,” you get this, and then you end up with this.

There are other examples, but what I want to hear are your ideas.

What should a serious effort involving local bloggers in a community website look like, and what would you tolerate to make it viable? What value do you want to see from an “NIT” in return?