Life with newspapers... and without

Technology PR and marketing consultant and blogger Renee Blodgett still dreams about newspapers, and has written an essay about their role -- in England, at least -- in defining social class and community and meeting other needs: Down the avenue: Who Shot the Paperboy?

Her column, in turn, inspired Chris O'Brien to write a piece encouraging news organizations to focus on local community via the Web and somehow reinvent enough of a local marketplace to support multi-platform professional newsrooms, "as part of local news ecosystem": How Passion for Newspapers Points to a Way Forward.

Since I taught a media history class last semester, those two blog items reminded me of something Archive.org has preserved online. For a look at newspaper audience dedication the Web -- and before TV -- see what happened when New York delivery drivers went on strike 54 years ago:
Internet Archive: 17 Days: The Story of Newspaper History in the Making.

Do watch it... You'll be struck (no pun intended) by not only how many people were willing to line up around the block for a paper during the truckers' strike, but how many papers there were, each with its dedicated audience, much like the London scene Renee describes. That strike, during the last summer of World War II, inspired some serious studies of the audience view of a newspaper's varied "uses and gratifications" -- most of which are met by many different media today.

The 1945 model was still good and strong 20 or so years later when I delivered the Daily Hampshire Gazette around the edges of the Smith College campus. Now I live in an even smaller college town, where the local twice-weekly paper has dropped its price to 25 cents and its reporting staff appears to be one person. The bigger regional paper doesn't seem to give any reporter time to get to know the community. (There have been four in the two years I've lived here.)

Historically, what has been important to readers? Using the headline examples from Renee's London paper for examples, even the 1945 New York crowd was interested in news-you-can-use like "Quest for the perfect bottom," and in being entertained by crime-story sensationalism like "Bright City Star in Death Plunge." Those probably were all higher on the audience agenda than investigative reporting or watchdog coverage of government and big business. So were the "hatched, matched and dispatched" stuff of community (births, weddings, obituaries), the local police blotter and court coverage, along with local help-wanted ads, apt-to-let ads and car-for-sale ads.

Putting that all in one dead-tree package with national and world news sold papers, and it sold local display ads, enough to pay the salaries of a large enough staff to do more civic-minded, public-service investigation, fact-gathering and reporting -- if the publisher was so inclined.

We still have all the pieces... some being taken by blogs, TV (online or off), CraigsList, Amazon, Google, Facebook, YouTube and Twitter... but figuring out where to put the rest, and how to pay for it, is quite a puzzle, especially on a local and regional level.

NPR is often mentioned as a model of non-profit funding that might be adapted by local news websites and citizen journalism projects. (The New Haven Independent is still my favorite.) It will be interesting to see what NPR itself accomplishes with its new www.localnewsinitiative.org

New media tools Sprouting on Web

Thanks to a Facebook post by Paul Jones at UNC, I'm taking a first look at Sprout Builder, a Web2.0 tool for sharing multimedia content.

Paul pointed to some Sprouts by Howard Rheingold, whom I expect to be ahead of the curve and teaching about it. I also see that Sproutbuilder is already in use by Gannett newspapers, so here's my first attempt at embedding a Sprout in Blogger:

Journalism: Mindset, profession or citizenship?

Some links for a possible class discussion...

Salon's Glenn Greenwald goes after Washington Post columnist David Brooks for being part of an "inside the Beltway" cultural mindset that makes the press less of a critical fourth estate.

"... One of the most predominant attributes of the contemporary Beltway journalist: Because they are integral members of the Washington establishment, rather than watchdogs over it, they are incapable of finding fault with political power and they thus reflexively defend it and want it to remain unchanged."

Greenwald, Bill Moyers and Jay Rosen discussed the same issue last week on Bill Moyers' Journal, now available as transcript, podcast or video stream. Rosen got in the last word, emphasizing the two-way Web:

"It's just as good at enabling us to send messages to them as it is for them to tell us. And I think what people have to do is remember the internet runs two ways, and to use it to tell Washington what to do."

Meanwhile, Dave Winer at Scripting.com started an interesting discussion of participatory journalism, under the heading One more time--open the news industry!

Says Dave, a longtime two-way Web writer:

"I want to be a reporter, but a new kind of reporter. Instead of one of the few, I want to be one of the millions. And I want technology to find a way to do what reporters of the 20th century used to do, to organize all the information from what they used to call 'sources' into reports that people like you and me can read and think about and discuss."

Cybergeeks Goosing the Gray Lady?

New York magazine has great fun with headlines... I borrowed a couple of key words for mine from its fascinating article about The New York Times online development team and what New York's Emily Nussbaum says may be "the only happy story in journalism."

The article discusses some new features I hadn't been paying attention to at http://nyt.com (or http://nytimes.com -- in this age of Internet journalism even "main stream media" can be flexible about its identity).

For Emily's full magazine story (a few thousands words, plus comments), see: The Renegades at the New York Times

Despite the swiftness of these changes, certainly compared with other newspapers’, their significance has been barely noted. That’s the way change happens on the web: The most startling experiments are absorbed in a day, then regarded with reflexive complacency. But lift your hands out of the virtual Palmolive and suddenly you recognize what you’ve been soaking in: not a cheap imitation of a print newspaper but a vastly superior version of one. It may be the only happy story in journalism.

Speaking of change and evolution in the media, New York magazine traces its roots to the Sunday magazine of the old Herald Tribune. See my December item, Historic magazine archive via Google. The magazine kept going after the daily paper stopped publishing in 1967. (For more of its history, try its Wikipedia page.)

12.5 Tips from a year ago

A search of journalism-related sites at MediaGeeks.org led me to a vague comment I'd made on a page that eventually led to this January 2007 item, which I'd forgotten about.

It will be worth discussing and arguing about in my January 2008 classes if I post a reminder here... which is also a "stealth" way of point people to MediaGeeks.org

12 and a half rules to be a good journalist

Briefly, they are:
12. DO WHAT YOU LOVE
11. WAKE UP ANGRY, AMBITIOUS
10. DON’T BE THE LOYAL MEMBER OF ANY PARTY, GROUP, CLUB, NGO
9. BE CATHOLIC OF WRITERS AND WRITING
8. FIND YOURSELF A ROLE-MODEL/MENTOR
7. BE A THRIVER, NOT A SURVIVOR
6. NEVER WORK WITH SUCCESS/ REWARD IN MIND
5. WRITE, DRAW, SHOOT, CREATE EVERY DAY
4. KEEP LEARNING EVERY DAY
3. FEAR NOBODY, QUESTION EVERYTHING
2. NEVER BE EMBARRASSED TO ASK STUPID QUESTIONS
1. CHASE YOUR DREAM
1/2 If POSSIBLE MARRY OUTSIDE THE PROFESSION

Another bit of stealth-educational broaden-your-horizons linkage: The list's origin/inspiration link to the Indian Institute of Journalism & New Media.