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.

Back to the New York Times

Yep - next assignment is to dissect a day or so of Politico.com. That will be fun. But in the meantime I am still blogging.

If you saw my post Watching Giants Struggle, you heard me talk about how so many in Journalism just don't get what is really happening these days. It was so refreshing to read a NYT journalist who DOES get it. Got this through the Romenesko link on Carlos' class blog. The headline was The media's become a kind of reverse roach motel. (Headlines are more important than ever in Internet writing, BTW. But they have to be even shorter and punchier than in a 7 column spread newspaper - this one was an exception but it worked). Well it did the trick and I read the article. Fantastic.

'Media Has Become a Kind of Reverse Roach Motel ...'

And Other Thoughts From New York Times Columnist David Carr on the Pursuit of Truth ... and What Happens Next

Straight to some talking points from David Carr: and his interviewer Simon Dumenco, media columnist at Advertising Age.

Carr: Well, if you're asking if I was surprised, the answer is yeah. In terms of the wholesale collapse -- the combination of secular and cyclical changes, to the point where the question is not who will survive but will the whole thing burn down and be replaced by something else? -- I did not anticipate that. I find it shocking...

Carr: If I didn't fundamentally believe in The New York Times building and leveraging its way through, I couldn't stick with it. I think the fact that we've got 20 million uniques, 3 million of whom are there all the time, that's gotta be a business. Part of what I wonder about is people keep saying, "Well, when things get better ..." What if the combination of secular and cyclical change that we have -- what if this is normal? What if all the money that was sloshing around was in fact from the housing bubble, from easy credit, and that credit does not return? I think that's a much more difficult and scary problem. I haven't seen the money coming back yet.

Dumenco: Yeah, I don't think it's coming back. Certainly a lot of the sloshing within media was just the pure, unadulterated monopoly money -- monopoly-power money, which is gone or going away.

Carr: Who benefited from that monopoly? It wasn't just the owners....

Carr: Yeah. It's like, what will The New York Times be? Will they need me? Will they want me? I just think things are gonna be shifting rapidly. They make it clear that in the current paradigm they value what I do, but I think things will change very rapidly.

You have to read the whole thing -

My analysis - I'll do it in bullets

• When you have the web traffic like the NYT does - there is a business there. I'm an internet guy. Traffic like that is "to die for."
• You gotta get rid of the spoiled-ness. Carr has it right, the media may not have been paid like kings, but they lived like kings. They were a privileged class. It was a bubble that has burst.
• The business paradigm was built upon newspapers, television, and other types of media holding a monopoly on public communications. That monopoly is gone.
• Summary. There IS a business there. A huge one. It will not be the old monopoly recovered. The media class will not revert to its previous privileged status (at least in Manhattan). The business will change. The people in it must change. Those who do not, will leave and probably not return.

These guys get it.