However, those facts don’t justify paying folks who don’t do “good insightful journalism”. They have to justify their pay some other way, or do without.

I mention that because the vast majority of what passes for “news” isn’t “good insightful journalism”. It’s rewritten press-releases.

I believe that folks will pay for good insightful journalism. However, they’re not going to pay for rewritten press releases.

If I’m correct, the biz model for news will be different than it is today. Journalists who live up to the promises will be rewarded but folks who don’t will have a hard time.

For some reason, news folks hate that idea.

The reporters will need to be paid – I can’t say how it would work no matter how attractive it sounds for “communities to cover themselves.”

That’s all.

You have to pay people to do it well.

Who is going to do good, insightful journalism for free?

But Topix isn’t always useless.

It may be unique to this area because of the Army with people all over the country paying attention to Fort Leoanrd Wood, but our local items do attract a fair amount of comment. We had a recent meningitis outbreak at Fort Leonard Wood that got national media attention through the Associated Press and Topix had enough comments I had to pay attention to it. Same for a recent case of a soldier who is being court-martialed for raping and killing the wife of another soldier while her husband was in Iraq.

One **MAJOR** problem with Topix is that as far as I can tell it’s virtually unmoderated. That’s created major problems with stuff that I consider not just false rumors but outright libel getting posted there and basically going unchallenged.

Community comment is a good thing. Slander and libel are still illegal, even if they’re written with electrons and not ink.

_____

BINGO!!! Howard Owens gets it! (Too bad he couldn’t say some of those things publicly while he was still at GateHouse — or if he did, we weren’t getting them down at our local level.)

This is what I’m happy to see from Mr. Owens: “For local to really work, the people in the local community really need identify the news source as their own. People of local interest are the kind of people to be tired of their corporate overlords. It’s not that they object to corporate ownership. They just don’t want to have their face rubbed in it by a national brand.”

After 19 years in the print media, I’m running an internet-only newspaper in a rural but rapidly growing community outside Fort Leonard Wood in Missouri. In this town, GateHouse Media drastically cut the staff of the local daily newspaper, moved most of the non-news jobs to an adjoining county that is a major economic rival, fired a well-loved publisher who dedicated many decades — virtually his entire adult life — to GateHouse and the precedessor owners of the local newspaper cluster, and in the last half-year has had a 100 percent newsroom turnover with virtually the entire staff not only coming from out of town and but also now living in a city 30 minutes away that is a major economic rival.

What’s wrong with this picture?

I left GateHouse Media totally voluntarily, and deciding to do an Internet startup was an extremely hard decision for somebody with ink running in my veins for two generations (mom was a J-school grad in the 1950s back when women just DIDN’T do those things). The number one reason I got the courage to do this was the backing of angry local business leaders who valued old-fashioned muckraking journalism, not “pretty puppy dog” stuff, and were upset that their money was going to support out-of-town staff and basically believed their local newspaper was no longer local.

That, I believe, is the key to revenue issues. Go back to your history books. How did Pulitzer, Scripps, Hearst, etc. start? In most cases, today’s major national media either 1) began as relatively small entrepreneurship operations that recruited kick-butt reporters who grew their newspapers by running circles around the competition to the point that they became “must-read” operations, or 2) were funded by what we would today call large “equity investors” who believed in the value of news and were willing to provide the startup capital and ongoing cash infusions necessary to produce a quality product until it attracted enough attention to get enough advertisers and stand on its own.

In this rural community outside one of America’s largest Army installations, there are three paid weeklies, the Army’s free-distribution weekly, several civilian free-distribution weeklies, one GateHouse-owned daily, a mostly-news radio station that does in this town what television would do in a larger city, two major internet discussion forums (one of which I work with closely) and since shortly after the November elections, my online internet newspaper. The common thread of all the weeklies and the news radio station is that their staff have been around a **VERY** long time and have the trust of the community and therefore the advertising dollars flow based on personal relationships, even in tough economic times. The GateHouse daily, by contrast, is getting too many of its ads from out of town and is viewed as promoting out-of-town businesses. Some of the main people paying my bills are local business owners who are angry the local newspaper is promoting out-of-town businesses.

I’m not convinced that print newspapers can’t survive for at least one more generation in rural America. The weeklies around here work, often because their staff members have spent a decade or more in the community, know their people EXTREMELY well, and regularly break news that we in the daily newspapers and broadcast media don’t know anything about. But in the long run, the only way for newspapers to survive — whether in print or online –is with the backing of local people, both local readers and local businesses. Those who forget that have signed their own death warrants.

I’ve written a bit more about that here:

http://pulaskicountyweb.com/smf/index.php?topic=15038.0

This is what I’m happy to see: “For local to really work, the people in the local community really need identify the news source as their own. People of local interest are the kind of people to be tired of their corporate overlords. It’s not that they object to corporate ownership. They just don’t want to have their face rubbed in it by a national brand.”

After 19 years in the print media, I’m running an internet-only newspaper in a rapidly growing community outside Fort Leonard Wood in Missouri where GateHouse Media drastically cut the staff, moved most of the non-news jobs to an adjoining county that is a major economic rival, fired a well-loved publisher, and in the last half-year has had a 100 percent newsroom turnover with virtually the entire staff not only coming from out of town and but also now living in a city 30 minutes away that is a major economic rival.

What’s wrong with this picture?

I left GateHouse Media totally voluntarily, and deciding to do an Internet startup was an extremely hard decision for somebody with ink running in my veins for two generations (mom was a J-school grad in the 1950s back when women just DIDN’T do those things). The number one reason I got the courage to do this was the backing of angry local business leaders who valued old-fashioned muckraking journalism, not “pretty puppy dog” stuff, and were upset that their money was going to support out-of-town staff and basically believed their local newspaper was no longer local.

I’m not convinced that print newspapers can’t survive for at least one more generation in rural America. The weeklies around here work, often because their staff members have spent a decade or more in the community, know their people EXTREMELY wekk, and regularly break news we in the daily newspapers and broadcast media don’t know anything about. But in the long run, the only was for newspapers to survive — whether in print or online –is with the backing of local people, both local readers and local businesses. Those who forget that have signed their own death warrants.

I’ve written a bit more about that here:

http://pulaskicountyweb.com/smf/index.php?topic=15038.0

To Bob Wyman:

“The ideal news source would be one that I picked based on political perspective (left, right, center), quality of writing, etc. It would then provide all the news I needed at all levels and would customize its presentation to me based on knowledge of my residence, location of work place, industry, interests, etc. You may argue that folk who’ve tried to build such a system have, so far, failed. Nonetheless, that is precisely what we will have one day.”

What do you mean, one day? We have that now. It’s called a city newspaper. They provide a mix of stuff from all levels, they (usually) have well-defined political leanings, they know where you live, and you can throw out the sections you hate.

Online, we have the power to aggregate. We can get the stuff from all levels from disparate sources without much trouble. We certainly don’t need one website to do it all for us and I would argue that’s a bad idea. Original content should go on one website and be aggregated by others.

What hyperlocal gives us is the most natural place to form online communities around news content. That’s why I think Howard is probably right about the brand thing. It seems right that a person is more likely to commit to a community if they know and trust (or at least know) the people running it.

Anyway, we need experiments with both to determine for sure who’s right. Go Jeff.