When readers recently recommended overwhelmingly that a slimmed down Miami Herald should reposition itself with more local news, many of them pointed to the Neighbors sections.

There isn't enough community news in them, several score wrote. Reviewing the sections, I agree.

Neighbors sections, which run twice a week in Miami-Dade and once a week in Broward, are designed to be what in the trade is called ''hyper-local'' or ''local-local''. They are supposed to burrow inside the metropolitan area to cover the news closest to you.

The Herald largely invented the formula 30 years ago in collaboration with the journalism school at Northwestern University. Other big metropolitan dailies nationwide copied, especially as they saw their circulation shrink while the numbers at small community papers remained healthy.

Now that advertising has dropped, too, and the big metro dailies are in crisis, many are cutting back on community and zoned editions, though still looking for ''hyper-local'' formulas online.

The Herald, to its credit, has stood by Neighbors, today publishing 11 tabloid editions in Miami-Dade and six in Broward. It's a large and complex operation, but is seen by business and editorial executives as serving both readers and small advertisers who can't afford ads in the big paper. It also is part of the newspaper's culture. Many top editors started as junior reporters in Neighbors.

But Neighbors is not what it used to be, nor what senior editors tell me they hope it can become. Ironically, they are buoyed by your recent criticisms.

''The editions were taken for granted for a long time,'' Jim Murphy, the interim editor overseeing the Miami-Dade Neighbors, said. ``For reporters, it was not as glamorous or sexy as being on the front page. Now we are finding out that people really do want this sort of news, and that we are the people who can best give it to them. I'm encouraged when readers criticize because it shows they care and that we need to step it up to meet their expectations.''

Executive Editor Anders Gyllenhaal hopes to add more material contributed by members of the community, while maintaining a balance with staff copy. The rollout of a redesigned MiamiHerald.com next month will be a first step toward including the website as part of the process.

The pullback in Neighbors coverage actually began in the 1990s. Miami-Dade, for example, was divided into seven zones then, a number that has since fluctuated. Still, each Neighbors edition had at least one editor, three reporters and some part-time student reporters.

Today, one editor is responsible for two editions. Each edition has only one staff reporter to cover an average of roughly five communities. Part-timers, most from local university journalism schools, fill in.

The result is predictable. There is less government and analytical or explanatory stories. Whole communities go uncovered some days. In their place are features that run in more than one edition.

To be sure, the features are reader-friendly and valuable. Also, each edition has lists of police, sports and real-estate highlights for all communities, as well as other valuable features such as the calendar, business announcements, military enlistments, student achievements or a service column.

But there are large shortcomings, such as these on one Sunday in July:

The Coconut Grove edition had strong coverage on waterfront improvement, but aside from a downtown Miami brief, there were no stories about that Neighbors edition's other communities: Key Biscayne, Brickell, the Roads, Little Havana and Shenandoah. There was, however, a feature on jogging programs for kids on the Upper East Side.

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