Let a Thousand Journalistic Flowers Bloom

Out of the wreckage of the Rocky Mountain News comes news that new Web sites are sprouting in Denver, featuring the work of former Rocky staffers who have gone out on their own. Good for them.

A group of former RMN sportswriters has started Inside The Rockies, to cover the city's baseball team. Other staffers are gathering at I Want My Rocky to post stories from their old beats. Some of them plan to spin off their coverage into their own blogs or sites. 

We're seeing this phenomenon elsewhere as news organizations downsize. The St. Louis Beacon carries the work of former Post-Dispatch staffers. In Phoenix, a group of former staffers from the East Valley Tribune has started The Arizona Guardian, to cover state politics. Jeff Jarvis wrote the other day about a reporter for the L.A. Daily News, Greg Hernandez, who went into competition with his former employer with a sharp-looking site within a week of being laid off. (And you know what? These folks are doing actual reporting, contrary to the idiotic canard that"real"  journalism can only be committed by large newspaper companies, and certainly not by blogs.)

It's not at all clear yet if there is a successful business model is for these sort of things. But it may be possible for some of the paper's stronger beat reporters to find a way to get advertisers or even readers to pay for in-depth coverage that was lost when the paper folded. 

This sort of thing was unthinkable a few years ago, of course, and it speaks to the democratization of information wrought by the Web. In the old days, you needed a printing press to be a publisher; now, with blogs and other easy-to-use Web platforms, everybody is a publisher. It may be a while until people laid off by the Rocky Mountain News or other papers can find a job; while they're looking, it's a great idea for them to take a shot at being entrepreneurs and starting their own online publications.

We're going to see much more of this in the months to come, as the cutbacks in newsrooms and of entire papers continue. Some of them are going to be dazzling successes and provide stiff competition or replacement for their former employers. Others will be interesting experiments. But they all point to the fracturing of the old, central journalism model into a million bright, shining, new sources of news and information, created and presented in new ways. And that's a good thing.

Comments

[Dave]

Smug comments from an employed ex-reporter. No argument here that our profession has badly reacted to the Web, but "million bright, shining, new sources of news" is a load of b.s. It takes full-time pay to support a full-time reporter.

[Dave]

Nice post, Mark. I recall you recently reposted a piece you did on all the skills journalists have and can re-apply elsewhere. I think you should consider having that be a permalink in your site nav as there are many in that camp. If you can relink it in the comments, that would be great. I'm trying to help some local journalists recently laid off and wanted to send this post to them but wasn't able to easily find it.

[John Reinan]

Jim Hopkins, former USA Today reporter, gets something like 30,000 unique visitors and 300,000 page views a month at Gannett Blog. He's broken significant stories any number of times and has an audience keenly interested in his topic.

He's been written up in a half-dozen premier MSM publications, including the NYT and WSJ.

Yet he struggles to make $1,000 a month.

How many ex-newspaper reporters are going to be able to create as good a site as Jim's? Not many. So what are the odds that dozens or hundreds of them are going to carve out a living with their websites? Pretty slim, I'd say.

[Mark Potts]

I'm not saying everybody is going to make a living with blogs. But the Gannett Blog example is not a good one. It has very limited advertising potential, because of its narrow subject matter. So it just doesn't get significant CPMs. By contrast, a site like perezhilton.com, covering entertainment and celebrity—essentially a one-man show—reportedly is bringing in hundreds of thousands of dollars a year in ad sales.

[John Reinan]

I'd say Perez is not a good example, either. Your average ex-newspaper reporter who starts a blog or website is not going to become the next Perez Hilton. They're going to write about what they know -- say, Denver County politics or San Antonio water issues or Seattle businesses or whatever. These are also topics not likely to bring in CPMs.

[Mark Potts]

John:
Actually, local CPMs in AdSense are surprisingly high. But that wasn't my point. I'm by no means saying that individual blogs are the only answer—indeed, most of the examples I cite are group efforts. The business model, as I said, is uncertain; in many cases individual blogs may only work if they're side businesses for their proprietors. But for towns that are losing their papers, all of these attempts represent new potential sources of information, and proof that the death of a paper doesn't necessarily mean a 100 percent loss of reporting and coverage.

[Mark Potts]

Dave: Watch this space!
Mark

[Dave]

From today's (March 12) NYT:

“It would be a terrible thing for any city for the dominant paper to go under, because that’s who does the bulk of the serious reporting,” said Joel Kramer, former editor and publisher of The Star Tribune and now the editor and chief executive of MinnPost .com, an online news organization in Minneapolis.

“Places like us would spring up,” he said, “but they wouldn’t be nearly as big. We can tweak the papers and compete with them, but we can’t replace them.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/12/business/media/12papers.html?_r=1&hp

Exactly. Newspapers pay reporters to pursue the story and without even a miserable reporter salary to keep body and soul minimally functional, who's going to have the time to cover, say, local & county government? It's not a part time endeavor that can be squeezed in between other obligations. And as pointed out above, there's a lot of important content that won't double as advertiser linkbait. Part timers and volunteers are no subsitute for a real paper.

Again, no contradicting your main point that papers fumbled the Web. But journalism's demise is no reason for celebration and netroots b.s. of "a thousand journalistic flowers" is wrong. There will be no flowers, just a brownfield.

[My Blog On Flowers]

This was great reading on flowers for the day.