Wall Street Journal reporter's mom loves the Olive Garden

This story is great ... an 85-year-old grandma has been "reviewing" restaurants for the Grand Forks Herald in North Dakota, including such gems as Applebees, Taco Bell and KFC. The other day, she wrote a glowing review of what she called the largest, most beautiful new restaurant in town: the Olive Garden.

It turns out Marilyn Hagerty had one bowl of pasta and a glass of water, declining the lemonade. Her review is like a play-by-play of her lunch outing.

It's also "gone viral," generating some 290,000 hits on the paper's website. (The next most well-read story on the site drew 5,000 or so hits.) Predictably, some blogs and haters are taking her to town for writing about the mundane eatery down the street in anything but their own snarky, condescending fashion.

Let the haters hate. I'm all for grandma, for lots of different reasons. It turns out she's the widow of the former newspaper editor, and the mother of a Wall Street Journal reporter. She didn't raise no slouch.

She's also been doing this for years -- critiquing local eateries that a frugal, 85-year-old woman might actually enjoy, as opposed to some bullshit haute cuisine that no one but a 1-percenter could actually afford during a recession. And when I say years, I mean she's been with the paper six decades, according to this AP piece, which is the most thorough and best-written of all the coverage I've seen of her Olive Garden expose online.

But there's another reason for me to love Grandma Hagerty. While young folks are flocking online, it's the 40-and-older crowd (if not the 70-and-older crowd) that is keeping print circulation afloat. And print subsidizes online coverage alot more than online subsidizes print, at least for now. (Old folks, to my knowledge, are the fastest growing section of the American population. Let's hope they all get newspaper subscriptions, fast, or print is a goner.)

In other words, her loyal following of frugal, octogenarian, Taco Bell-eating print readers provides the salary for the more skeptical, critical-thinking, self-fashioned "elite" reporters digging through public documents for their next big scoop.

You StateHouse reporters and public events bloggers think you're where the action is, but your front page or local section "expose" is just the accident these readers trip across on their way to her restaurant 'reviews.' (I put 'reviews' in quote marks because she admits that if she doesn't like a restaurant, she doesn't write anything. Good old grandma!)

Newspapers, in the past 10 years, have adopted the mantra "local-local" to describe their eagerness to corner a market the New York Times and Wall Street Journal can't, which involves printing hyper-local news, like what's on the school lunch menu.

The problem is, it doesn't work. There's no room in the shrinking print edition of your daily newspaper to report on every old pothole, every new park bench and every change to the school lunch menu in your entire coverage area, and there's fewer bodies in the newsroom to pull that mundane crap together. It seems hardly worth the effort, especially if you're at a statewide paper known for its investigative work, like the Star Tribune, which does "local-local" worse than any paper I've ever seen.

But newspaper readers are typically older propertyowners with kids who want to know about things that will impact their property values, tie up traffic, inspire them to switch school districts or otherwise waste their tax dollars. So if a McDonalds is opening up down the street and traffic is going to be a bear, they want to know that. If that McDonalds is super sketchy and the kids behind the counter pick their nose and pocket your change, they want to know that, too.

Weekly newspapers tend to do this kind of coverage quite well. They're at the Planning Commission meetings and leafing through the business license requests and the zoning variances -- the kind of stuff the big boy newspapers often can't be bothered with.

How can print dailies compete with the weeklies without looking picayunne? They can contract community voices like Grandma Hagerty to do that kind of pothole coverage reporting for them -- "Mcdonalds has opened up downtown! What's the deal with all the broken parking meters? That new playground is perfect for my grandkids!" -- which would allow their core staff to focus on the bigger stories.

That's just my two cents.