How are the local news media serving your community, and what suggestions would you like to share with some of the professionals in the industry?

Amid a rapidly changing news media landscape, Sacramento residents are being invited to help frame the conversation.

"It kind of feels like the Wild West in a way," Ron Cooper, head of Access Sacramento, said of all the changes media companies are making in the face of audience fragmentation caused by the Internet and cable TV, and an economic recession that has taken a toll on newsroom budgets.

Cooper's nonprofit group, which offers a spectrum of public access programming and is supported by funding from the Sacramento Metropolitan Cable Television Commission, is sponsoring a discussion on local media tonight at the Coloma Community Center, 4623 T St. in Sacramento.

Access Sacramento is working with California Common Cause and the Sacramento Media Group to put on the event from 6 to 8:30 p.m.

Local media professionals, elected officials, community groups and Sacramento residents attending the event will be asked to discuss topics such as local political coverage, community input, diversity and broadband Internet access.

Sacramento Access will record the event and submit a report to all local media companies and the Federal Communications Commission with the goal of trying to help journalists better understand what the public is seeking from its local media outlets.

That's an ambitious goal in an industry experimenting with new business models and how best to serve communities as its resources and staff shrink.

"If anybody tells you they know what's going on, they're lying," said Regina McCombs, a faculty member at Florida's Poynter Institute, a nonprofit that examines journalism issues and provides training to journalists.

At the community level, some individuals and startups have seen opportunities to fill voids that local media companies used to dominate. Among them:

• Natomas Buzz – a blog by former Bee journalist Brandy Tuzon Boyd – has dominated coverage of the neighborhood on some important topics.

• Channel 1000 is a professional online video newscast for state workers union SEIU, started up by local news reporter Naj Alikhan.

• sacramentopress.com is a for-profit startup, aiming to cover Sacramento with an online newspaper staffed largely by community volunteers.

These operators, though, will tell you they can't replace what the Pew Center Project for Excellence in Journalism calls the "legacy media."

"I don't think you'll ever be able to replace the TV news, the radio news, the newspaper," said Alikhan.

As Al Tompkins, another Poynter faculty member, put it, "Who's going to cover the planning and sewer commissions?"

Some media consumers, like Paul G. Mattiuzzi of Sacramento, worry that such coverage is endangered.

Mattiuzzi gets his news from TV, radio, magazines and the Internet but goes to the newspaper for local news, and questions whether it has "the same substance it had before."

Very local news tends to be expensive relative to the size of the audience, and yet can produce important stories.

Traditional media organizations are best placed to continue to provide that local role, but "until they find an economic model, they're going to find it hard to put the resources back in reporting," said Amy Mitchell, deputy director of the Project for Excellence in Journalism, producers of the annual State of the News Media. With the economy reeling, she said, "there's less and less time to find that model."

Call The Bee's Carlos Alcalá, (916) 321-1987.