I actually gave up on regularly reading newspapers even before the web, and so I might have predicted the end of industrial age newspapers a long time ago. But, in spite of that, now that it's actually happening--and happening locally with the Seattle PI, I can't say that I ever prepared to live in a city where one might not be able to find a couple different local papers offering serious coverage of the big stories.
So, what does this have to do with the Central District? Well, in some sense, the local newspapers haven't really had a ton of attention on local issues in our neighborhoods. And, that's part of the reason why the newspapers are dying out--the newspapers aren't primarily in the news business, they are in the business of delivering us (the public) to their audience: the advertisers. And, being treated like a product by the papers is not a priority for most of us.
But, on the other hand, the PI and Seattle Times have both employed journalists who have provided some serious coverage of issues that effect us. And, however one might complain about newspapers, we've got to worry about, e.g., what shenanigans go down at city hall if there's not a couple different journalists digging into those stories and bringing them to the public.
Fortunately, we have Central District News and the other neighborhood blogs / site around Seattle. I don't know that these websites can altogether replace what we might get from the PI, but they are part of it--and, in some very local ways, we already are getting a lot better information out of them.
Mike Davidson, who works at Newsvine (a news company with offices in the PI building) wrote some of his thoughts and observations in Last Rites. And, that made me want to post something here to CDN. I don't have any answers (though Mike has some ideas--which are worth looking into).
What do you think? Definitely curious to hear Scott's and CD Guys' and other folks from Neighborlogs thoughts as well.
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We've always considered neighborhood blogging to be about about a different slice of news that didn't previously get reported. Only people within a mile of 23rd & Union care about what might be built there. The Seattle PI would never have wanted to cover that any any depth because it's not of interest to the vast majority of their readers. Some lucky neighborhoods have had some of this handled by small print publications, but only on an infrequent schedule of publication and with a cost structure that no longer works.
First, there's a lot of reporting that would still happen here and at other blogs if we didn't have any daily papers:
- Politics, which is a naturally passionate topic for people, and one that is better told without the forcing a fake neutral point of view
- Crime and other emergent events, because they directly impact peoples lives and are actually very easy, if sometimes tiresome, to write about.
- Community events and organizations, because they usually have members who are invested in getting the word out about them, and the internet makes that easy.
Second, there's the content that newspapers should just forget about. National columnists and AP feeds should be jettisoned ASAP. People who want that can go straight to the source at the NYTimes or whoever else did the original reporting. Including it in a local paper just wastes space.
But there's a whole other... read more t of reporting that would suffer without the resources that newspapers have. It's basically anything that takes more than a day to assemble. Things like big investigative pieces, or long court trials that require someone to sit in a courtroom for weeks on end. Advertising-driven websites won't ever be able to properly monetize a single story or a small series of them to be able to fund someone to do that kind of work. And the need for rapid churn of content on the web will usually mean that a website's direct resources will end up being devoted stories that are easier to produce.
I'm hoping that there is some opportunity for that kind of work to continue through the benevolence of readers and/or charitable funds. For example, I've been a huge fan of Claudia Rowe's reporting on the gang issue around here, and have wondered whether individual readers value that kind of work enough to directly support it through some sort of contribution system.
But I do think there's an opportunity for nimble organizations to adapt to the evolving world of news. They come equipped with the two main pieces that make it all possible: people who can write great content, and people who can sell that content to advertisers. Those core pieces are very valuable, and could be used as a profitable glue for a loosley tied network of smaller sites. Everything else in a news organization is overhead and should be considered the first to go when hard times hit.
For example, we're currently looking for a salesperson who could help market our large surplus of advertising inventory on our neighborhood blog network. But it's been a hard position to fill because it's not yet at a scale that will support a full-time position. An existing organization with an experienced sales staff could be making money off of hundreds of websites around Seattle if they became the broker for those site's advertising inventory.
On the content side, there's similar opportunity for coordination. A lot of reporting is time-consuming and repetitive. Things like picking up police reports and combing through court filings are all things that could be provided as a centralized resource for members of a large regional network.
The trick with that is that existing organizations need to get over their pride. Cooperation and coordination is good, and ignoring the stuff that happens outside of their offices is only going to increase the number of challenges they face.
We definitely live in exciting times...