Small town newspaper of the future

Preamble: How we got here

I believe in newspapers.

I grew up in a family that subscribed to 3 of them each day. All were dailies - one morning newspaper and two afternoon papers. Our hometown paper was The Oak Ridger, owned by an irascible local journalist-businessman and very edgy. People loved it, hated it, blessed it and cursed it.

Only one of them, The Knoxville News Sentinel ( a Scripps-Howard newspaper at the time) had a Sunday paper. I loved reading all of them, from a very early age. It was one of my real windows on the world - especially the local world in which I lived and operated during those tender years.

The area now has two daily papers. The Sentinel is a shadow of its former self. It became milquetoast about 20 years ago. The same happened with the Oak Ridger. When the journalist-publisher who owned it sold it to a consortium in the early 80's, the locals started calling it 'The Mediocre Ridger'. It also got called 'The USA Today of our valley' - (not a compliment) - with apologies to any Georgetown professors some might know.

The Knoxville Journal, loved by many, died in the mid-80's. It was by far the best source of really discerning thinking on state, local and even national government issues. I knew one of the reporters. During some state issues of importance, he would literally go to Nashville and live there for weeks on end and write fascinating daily posts. A Vanderbilt graduate, he wrote with a unique Tennessee-homegrown-intellectual style that was winsome, engaging and still piercing. When you finished reading, you understood.

The Journal was killed by The Sentinel, and by the growth of a generation that didn't put as much stock in the kind of writing that Bob did.

When I visit family there now, the only reason I pick up one of the skinny, onion-skinned papers is if I am there during Thanksgiving. I want to see the 'Black Friday' deals and see if it is worth getting up at 4 AM to snag a real deal. The real local journalism I loved died during the late 80's and early 90's.

When I finally got to work for a paper, The Capital in Annapolis, I found some of the elements I had missed from the papers of my youth. I attributed a number of these to the same quality of journalism (and character) that I remembered from those days.

One of my most admired writers among those at The Capital made a statement that really gave me pause: "The saddest thing about local papers dying is the fact that in small towns all across America people have lost their way of seeing what others are doing."

The wisdom of that statement struck me with the force of a tornado. That was what I had seen die 20 years earlier. The ability to "see" locally. 'News' was there, but the seeing eye was different.

That was it.

Even if the paper continued, it continued with a sort of journalistic glaucoma. And, for many localities, there was total blindness. A half-page section in a semi-nearby metro did not cut it. Might as well turn out the lights.

Fast forward to 2009.

Breaking News!
NEWSPAPERS ARE DYING

Yawn... They died in the 80's.

I had already started getting my news online by the 90's.

Proposal: The newspaper of the future.

• Create a platform where local news and happenings can be displayed, searched, edited, rated, commented on and spread with vigor.
  
• Make it an open-ended, real-time digital communications platform using all sorts of input - video uploads from cellphones, citizen Twitter posts, FaceBook scrapes, fax machine scans, carrier pigeon-note scans - whatever. Bring back the meaning of the word "post."
  
• Get locally-involved and locally passionate people writing about local 'things'. Pay some, accept all. Allow them to network with each other on the platform.
  
• Train them. Have a core of professionals and an army of amateurs - passionate amateurs - who want to tell their own stories in their own ways.
• Accept the amateur self-publishing/social networking revolution that is sweeping the world. Much of the world's time and energy is focused on this. Go where people are.
  
• Select and lead amateur publishers into some of the disciplines journalists have had to learn over decades, to enhance the product. Train the amateurs who will accept it.
  
• Allow local self-publishers to link to their own platforms, but aggregate them, draw them out and edit them on a central platform - "The Newspaper"
• Gain credibility from openness and respect for the amateur journalists a well as from the wisdom and seasoned discernment a few really good journalists can provide the platform.
• Select the very best and print (yes I said that word) them in a weekend, coffee-table-able, summary on good stock. This will be available for those who want it and will pay a significant subscription fee. Make it a work of pride.
  
• Make the platform (and the resulting print product) regional in the sense of combined technology but granularly local in the involvement (and digital delivery) by impassioned residents of multiple small towns in the region. People in a town or a community will be able to publish - and have access to - intensely local news. People within the entire region can go granularly local in digital search (if they want to) or they can read selected stories from throughout the region in the print summary.
• The business model will be
  

1. Subscription to the print product and to select high-quality writing by the best of the pros and a few paid amateurs.
   
2. Display advertising on the digital site and select, high quality ads in the print summary. Use video advertising in an effective Internet mode. Short, advertorial, and some user-produced (like Google's TV experiment).
   
3. Re-invention of classifieds in the digital platform with powerful digital search, mapping and a rating system.
   
4. Sponsorship by local institutions of value, with strong advertorial content digitally (also open to ratings) and strong image in the print summary. Use video strongly here.
   

Vision:
Developed thinking will find a refined medium and again become a premium product, both in print and online. Digital news will be treated as a commodity.

People in small towns will know what each other are doing again. There will be both a place for popular (and regular-person-produced) news as well for a more professional journal of record - in both print and digital media - for every town.

© 2008 Alan Eason
This business plan is copyrighted. I wrote most of it in similar form in 2008.

Watching giants stuggle - the New York Times rejoices that it is keeping its head above the quicksand

The New York Times has an amazing article about its survival chances - one that would have been unthinkable 3 years ago. It exults in a tiny profit (actually a miniscule "plus") and the fact that it smartly positioned itself to "ride out another year of the recession, maybe two."

The article is called:

Resilient Strategy for Times Despite Toll of a Recession

The tone of the article shows how desperate things have become. For an industry where 20-30% profit margins were the norm a few years back it is a jaw-dropping shock to hear the company pride itself that it has only lost 14.2% in ad revenue in 2008, as opposed to 16% industry -wide.

The author then congratulates the company on the fact that it only has to take out small loans, rather than huge ones (hard to get) like other newspapers are scrambling for.

How the mighty are fallen.

Even more unbelievable is the sense one gets reading the article that their business plan has not really changed. Sure, they have "integrated the newsroom with the Web...added blogs and slideshows..." and tried some other digital experiments. But everything else seems the same. The author of the article seems to think that is progressive.

Well - they might have been progressive steps in 2000.

This is 2009. In Internet Years, as in dog years, that is six decades behind.

If only the business side of things were affected, they might be able to blame it on the recession. But the last 5 or 6 years have also taken a terrible toll on the Times' credibility with the revelations of several major scandals within its core journalism ethos. There is more amiss in the crystallized newspaper world than Internet competition. (That is a post for another time).

I don't exult in the demise of an American institution like the New York Times, or the newspaper industry as a whole. I do, however, find myself continually amazed that they cannot see the big picture.

American society - world society - has changed.

People are not reading newspapers, in print or online. They are reading news stories - not newspapers.

There is a vast difference.

Google, a popular hashtag on Twitter, your Facebook friends or even a good cable news blog can link you up in ten minutes to dozens more news stories you really like than your newspaper can in a total read.

It is not just that it is free. It is the fact that the filters are different. You can choose your own set.

But the giants can't see it - or won't.

Their editorial model and business model have to accomplish a lot more for them than just getting by.

If I may make a prediction - the end of the recession will not so much witness the end of problems for the NYT and other big papers as it will the huge success of their competition.

The real competition is news and opinion coming from everywhere, professional and amateur, aggregated online.

Welcome and Let's Begin!

Welcome to my new blog. If you poke around on the Internet (or on this site, as it grows), you'll find a number of other blogs I host or participate in. I love to be a part of what one editor I knew called, in roundabout terms, the blathering masses.

We differ on the importance of such. I actually believe that is one reason that so much of traditional media has a problem today. They are stuck in a box that calls this blog and millions like it "blather" and they are not real fans of listening to the masses. They would rather the masses listen to them.

Which type person are YOU?

• Thinking inside the Box
• Thinking outside the Box
• What is a Box?

Good food for thought.

More to come!

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