After the Newspaper

As urban dailies die, a search for other sources of local information

Jesse Walker | March 19, 2009

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There are papers that are trying to draw this amateur expertise into their pages. Some of those projects have had some successes, but there's a top-down quality to the experiments that limits them. A few years ago, The Washington Post wrote excitedly about the Gannett chain's attempts "to involve readers in news-gathering" and draw "on specific expertise that many journalists do not have." It's a fine idea and I wish them well, but the article's grand example, in which "retired engineers, accountants and other experts [were] solicited to examine documents and determine why it cost so much to connect new homes to water and sewer lines," doesn't sound all that different from the age-old journalistic practice known as "finding good sources."

The real challenge, particularly as papers either cut back or go out of business altogether, is to tap the information already flowing from citizen to citizen without any journalist's intervention. Then you can help it flow farther.

Managing Editor Jesse Walker is the author of Rebels on the Air: An Alternative History of Radio in America (NYU Press).

Comments

Paul|3.19.09 @ 4:43PM|#

I should know this, but I'm still confrused. Didn't the PI go to an online-only format?

BakedPenguin|3.19.09 @ 4:48PM|#

Paul - yeah, that was in the first paragraph.

Paul|3.19.09 @ 4:49PM|#

Thanks, Penguin. I just read the article. My bad. Ready! Fire! Aim!

|3.19.09 @ 4:55PM|#

You might notice at the PI that they're keeping on Jowls Connelly. They really need to kick him to the curb.

Ruby|3.19.09 @ 5:10PM|#

Good read: Newspapers and thinking the unthinkable

Hampton|3.19.09 @ 5:16PM|#

First they came for the Brazilian Bikini waxers...

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2009/03/19/national/a061735D74.DTL&tsp=1

|3.19.09 @ 5:19PM|#

How many trees are saved when a newspaper dies?

|3.19.09 @ 5:23PM|#

I'd feel worse about this if newspapers were actually any good at covering local news.

ed|3.19.09 @ 5:24PM|#

None. They're all killed out of spite.

BakedPenguin|3.19.09 @ 5:26PM|#

Ready! Fire! Aim!

Is your day job writing legislation?

sage, I get the feeling that if the Orlando Sentinel goes to a skeleton crew, they'll still keep Mike Bianchi and Mike Thomas, two great reasons to stop reading that rag.

Sven|3.19.09 @ 5:26PM|#

"I'd feel worse about this if newspapers were actually any good at covering local news."

Minneapolis/St. Paul has two newspapers (Star Tribune and the Pioneer Press. Both do an excellent job covering local news. The Star Tribune filed for bankruptcy protection a week or two ago. Not good.

Paul|3.19.09 @ 5:40PM|#

Ready! Fire! Aim!
Is your day job writing legislation?

Obama just called me. Says he's got a position in the Fed for me.

I told him I assumed the position already.

Harry Dean|3.19.09 @ 5:40PM|#

So, which of those sources is that Orange Line Special asshole?

|3.19.09 @ 5:57PM|#

I wonder if all these non-journalist participants will really step up to the plate and fill the void left by dying and dead newspapers...

Geotpf|3.19.09 @ 6:10PM|#

Couple things:

1. Businesses based around the razor and razor blade model, in the long term, always fail. That is, it makes sense to give away razors and charge a bundle for the blades-until somebody else starts making just the blades.

Newspapers gave away the news, but charged advertisers eyeballs. But banner ads don't replicate a thirty page supplement from Target, and classified ads have moved to non-newspaper-run websites like Craigslist and Monster.com.

2. Once you teach people that something is free or nearly free, you can't start charging for it, especially if it's easy to copy and others are offering the same thing for free. Newspapers cost 50 or 75 cents a day-and free on-line. Plus, even if you start charging for access to your website, there will always be 500 other papers throughout the country with everything other than local news that don't. Let's assume a local newspaper starts to charge. Somebody who is interested in sports or the funnies or the horescope or classified ads or international news or national news or statewide news or business or anything other than local news has plenty of non-local choices on-line. And there is probably blogs and scattered coverage from non-local newspapers of local events.

So, basically, newspapers are fucked.

What will survive are websites that have a narrow focus and few employees. Daily Kos qualifies-they are big enough now to pay for regular, real-world scientific telephone polls from a normal, legit outside pollster, something that is normally a newspaper's job.

|3.19.09 @ 6:35PM|#

When the extra crappy local daily went up to 75cents a day and a buck fifty on sunday, I quit going to the paper box at the local zippy mart. I got me a prescription for six months. $46.50 for seven days a week for six months. They even signed a contract for that price forever.
There's just something about the paper in my hands. Same with books and kindles.

Rube|3.19.09 @ 8:41PM|#

"So, basically, newspapers are fucked."

Then as taxpayers, we should bail them out.

rap|3.19.09 @ 8:44PM|#

In British Columbia we have the Tyee http://thetyee.ca/
(sorry, I don't know how to make the link)
Lots of local, provincial, and national news that doesn't make the mainstream outlets. Did anyone read about the Calgary "arrest Bush" demo? Only in the Tyee.

|3.19.09 @ 9:00PM|#

The kind of thinking that went into keeping Joel Connelly is the same kind of thinking that lead to the demise of the P-I. Agenda first, public stewardship later (maybe).

The people who ran the P-I simply did not understand (or care about) the people who live in Seattle.

|3.19.09 @ 10:57PM|#

Stephen Ellis didn't create the term "pavement radio", he merely translated and popularised it. It's a literal translation of an existing French phrase "radio trottoir", as he says so himself here:
http://www.jstor.org/pss/722689
Et voila.

Jesse Walker|3.19.09 @ 11:07PM|#

Thanks, Sam; I stand corrected.

economist|3.20.09 @ 12:48AM|#

Is anyone surprised that Geotpf tars all online news sources, except for the one that agrees with his own views?

Brenda|3.20.09 @ 3:36AM|#

I will miss the newspapers. Yes, they are bias (aren't we all). But it gave me another view to consider. I just don't have time to surf the web and find it all. It was (and, I do say it in past tense because I believe they are all extinct or heading that way) great to be able to read it at my leisure in front of the fireplace or on the deck sitting in the sun.

The other thing I will miss is the advertising. I may not have needed a new something or another, but I found out about a good deal or new color by reading the advertising. People enjoy and find out about enjoyable things by browsing a newspaper or a magazine. They search for a specific item or information on the Internet.

I may not have liked all reporters or news sources, but I will miss the spice that they added to my life.

I am also concerned for the television news sources as well. Advertising on television is taking a big hit just as the newspapers.

aix42|3.20.09 @ 9:27AM|#

This is a good point:
"When the Web guru Clay Shirky surveyed the state of the daily newspaper, he wrote that revolutions are what happen when "the old stuff gets broken faster than the new stuff is put in its place."

New models will emerge. Ads/Classifieds have been changed by progress. Change hurts, but to assume that once newspapers are gone that, well, thats it, game over man, GAME OVER!

I live in a tri-city area with 500000 pop that has one traditional paper. Maybe its in trouble. We also have University papers, free weeklies full over lefty bull and sex ads, but kernels of truth, community groups with quarterly dispatches. There are starting points, like the gadflies and interest groups mentioned in the article.. People love money and attention, generally. Folks will fill the voids in new and interesting ways.

Ink-stained Citizen Nothing: P|3.20.09 @ 9:57AM|#

We're not dead yet!

Invisible Finger|3.20.09 @ 4:09PM|#

The Internet is great at aggregating and sorting information, but it isn't always obvious where that information will come from.

Same goes for every newspaper for the past 40 years. Half the newspaper is wire reports, the other half is rewritten copy of press releases. The better newspapers have 2 or perhaps 3 reporters actually going to find stories or at least get facts based on tips. Good for a whopping 3 or 4 stories a week, total.

Ovi Demetrian Jr|3.26.09 @ 9:59PM|#

Outside.In is also pretty good for local news: http://outside.in/