Here’s one of four core principles for today’s media market: these days, talk is cheap.

It’s a simple idea. Take a lesson from Uncle Buffett and his acolytes at Morningstar: your castle is only as good as its moat. If others can easily invade your market, it’s a bad business.

Expressing an interesting opinion is relatively easy. It requires intelligence and skill, but not a lot of work or time. Yesterday, therefore, it was doled out as a reward to people who had already put in lots of work and time.

Today, no such aristocracy exists. The cleverest, hardest-working opinion makers rise rapidly to the top.

This, of course, is why TimesSelect didn’t work: interesting opinions aren’t scarce. And it’s the oldest cliche in the Valley of the Newsosaurs: blogs are interesting but empty.

Hey, most of them are.

But here’s something that many commentators don’t appreciate about local information markets, as opposed to national ones: local information is useful. Local information tells me where to apply for a job, where to go for fun and where not to walk after dark.

In a world where only the most relevant information gets read, media outlets need to be useful.

Usefulness requires work and time. The work can be in filtering, packaging or reporting. But whether you’re an ink-stained newspaper reporter or a greasy-shirted blogger, work and time are almost certainly going to be your moat.

But let’s get serious about the usefulness of crowdsourced hard-news reporting at the local level.

Every example of how Twitter, etc., is theoretically changing journalism seems to rely on extremely unusual tragedies, disasters or sensations.

I don’t know about your hometown paper, but in the one I work for, almost all of what you’d call “breaking news” (aside from the sports and arts coverage) falls into one of four areas:

1. Cops and courts — situations known only to a tiny group of private, deeply interested and unreliable individuals.
2. Political actions — city and county governments doing stuff, known only to a handful of deeply interested and unreliable people present.
3. Studies, findings and reports — released by governments, nonprofits and businesses.
4. Pseudo-events — announced press conferences, etc.

It’s hard to imagine “social journalism” being at all reliable in (1) or (2), and it’s hard to imagine it being much more effective in (3) or (4) than simply picking up the phone, firing up the Internet or going to the damn press event.

In situations like document dumps or earnings reports, putting many eyes on the problem can be an effective way of finding hidden gems or coming up with provocative questions.

But in almost every other local reporting situation, what’s really happening is that a reporter is composing a hypothesis, testing it with facts that haven’t yet been brought to light or widely shared, then explaining why they’re important. Though the social Web can be a tool for soliciting predefined information — “have you relocated because of the recession?” — composing hypotheses is not a task crowds do well.

Anybody who thinks floods, fires and ferry accidents are what local reporting is all about should look more often at his or her local newspaper.

Update 7/28: I’ve added links to Scott Karp’s related post at Publish2. I’ve been a Karp fan for years, and I’ve got mad respect for his whole team, but today they make useful villains.

a) Products that rely on the idea that people will simply be too dumb to figure out an alternative. These products rely only on informational barriers: once you know the better way to do things, it’s no trouble to do things the better way.

Like a car mechanic who preys on ignorance in order to sell more air filters, these products breed resentment.

and

b) Products that rely on the idea that people don’t have the time or effort to pursue an alternative. These products rely on procedural barriers: even if you spent the time to figure out an alternative, you’d need to alter your behavior to take advantage of it.

Like a car mechanic who pokes around in earnest for possible mechanical problems you haven’t yet noticed, these products breed loyalty.