"Journalists tend to go to the places it's easiest to get to, where they've been welcomed with lots of sophisticated press releases," she later told Journalism.co.uk.
The Media Trust, which works with media organisations and charities to help raise the profiles of communities with training and funding, is hoping to extract this 'edgier' information with new relationships prompted by its new Commission on the Future of Community News.
It hopes its work will influence the BBC strategic review, Ofcom's work, media unions, and political plans for the future of regional and local news.
The commission - its members and chair are yet to be announced - will meet to discuss how communities already create and distribute local news and how to meet challenges facing the news industry.
Diehl says a project could emerge from this, in a form not yet known: "We don't know what project might come out of it - one of the outcomes could be that local communities are funded and empowered to do their own local things."
But Diehl wants to see partnerships between community and conventional media, rather than news organisations - especially the BBC - doing it all for themselves.
Likewise, "we don't want communities just talking to themselves," she says. "We think it's really important for community voices to get heard as widely as possible."
She is keen to see more structured community newsgathering: "At the moment they're [news organisations] taking loads of user-generated content from the public but it's all quite haphazard, and anarchic. Can it be more structured? Should it be more structured?"
More structure could be provided via existing formal news organisations, or by "creating a new layer of news organisations, news skills and distributions," she adds.
At the Society of Editors Conference, Diehl suggested training community reporters, supported by a layer of journalists and funded through community media initiatives.
But the commission is intererested in non-traditional news organisations too: Yell.com's head of content, Nick Haworth, is on the Media Trust's community newswire board and Diehl said discussions would look at how Yell, which recently announced its intention to produce blog content, and Google could work better with communities and news organisations.
Diehl is convinced there are strong and powerful stories to be dug out, neglected because of community suspicion of the press: "I think communities are nervous about the media coming into their communities. There is a lack of trust about the media - that comes across in every survey that's ever done."
Although not everywhere, there is a feeling of 'them and us,' she says. The Media Trust is encouraged by its current projects, she adds, citing that The Community Newswire service, run in partnership with the Press Association, has enabled important stories to reach the conventional media.
Finance reporter - property
