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
- Subscription to the print product and to select high-quality writing by the best of the pros and a few paid amateurs.
- 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).
- Re-invention of classifieds in the digital platform with powerful digital search, mapping and a rating system.
- 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.
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.
I, too, am a fan of local newspapers. And while I like your desire to help them - I DO worry about any person just submitting video directly on the site without some person verifying it's authenticity. Or we could do what many news agencies are doing with the phone camera tape coming out of Tehran in the last few days - saying they can not verify the authenticity of the images.
ReplyDeleteYour concept is along the same lines as the project I proposed for our class. Trying to design a multimedia program for small to medium newspapers. You have much more detail in your proposal. Perhaps there is some sort of combination we can do here for a class project?
Hi Alan,
ReplyDeleteGreat pitch! I am also a fan of local newspapers. Your put forward some very interesting and effective ideas that would go along way towards bring the local paper to the 21st century. I really think it's important to provide a mix of professional and amateur contributors. I do think a sizable/effective editorial authority would necessary to manage amateur contributors.
Hi Alan! You give a lot of respect to those people who are eager and have the passion to document what's going on around them. That's really cool. This may be a model/pipe line for talent to enter into the jouranlism profession.
ReplyDeleteLiz:
ReplyDeleteI believe the totally incredible explosion of personal publishing ever since the Internet was launched gives testimony to that fact. The personal desktop publishing revolution of the late 80's and early 90's also predicted it. I was part of that too.
People want to write, not just read. They want to shoot great pictures and videos, not just look at other people's pictures and videos videos. Well, maybe 40 % of them. The other 60% want to stay passive. But they are not the leaders. The first 40% are.
I have been a photographer for years also and I well remember the moaning of the "professionals" in the late 80's when it seemed like EVERYONE was getting SLR's. People were no longer content with point-and-shoot cameras. They wanted to get creative. Professional photographers had to find new niches where they could still be professional. It was no longer enough to have a good camera and a trained eye. Lots of amateurs had good eyes too.
The true professionals have to share the stage now. But if they are good leaders, and will work with the amateurs, they will succeed.
From Katie, Nafisa and Macy
ReplyDelete1. What would differentiate this site from a community forum type of website?
2. It might be difficult to find the right skills for a skilled amateur in the community, how do you attract advertisers, it seems like there might be sites out there like that that are similar.
3. You could possibly take this idea and transform an existing site with an established audience and advertiser base.