With the Seattle PI just a few weeks from shutting down its printing press — and perhaps the entire operation — Seattle City Councilmember Nick Licata brought a council committee together today to talk about the future of newspapers in a soon-to-be one newspaper town. While I applaud Licata for tackling the complex topic — and giving people a forum to talk about it — I about fell out of my chair while I watched the live stream of the event at my desk. The vast majority of the discussion missed the point, straying into common misconceptions and old-school thinking about journalism in a new connected world. Finally, WestSeattleBlog‘s Tracy Record and Crosscut.com‘s David Brewster got their few minutes at the microphone.
Licata introduces them, “Editors, writers, producers, what do you call yourselves?”
“Journalists,” Record says, who runs arguably the most successful neighborhood news site in the country.
While Record and Brewster did a great job representing online news, the council proceeded to stray all over the place with questions that, out of fairness, represent the thinking of some people in the local news business. So without further ado, I’ve selected a few and added my own responses…
1. How will we save newspapers?
As Record told the council committee, newspapers are a delivery model. What needs saving is journalism, not newspapers. Arguing about saving newspapers and their large staffs misses the point: their business model is antiquated and did not adapt to a new reality. So let’s figure out how to create new sustainable business models that result in quality local journalism. Let’s think of ways to reinvent newspapers from the ground up online. Let’s focus our energy there instead of hearing ourselves talk about the institution of journalism and the good old days.
2. Ok, how do we keep all these journalists employed?
Still, wrong question. It’s easy to fall into the trap that the only way to produce quality journalism is for traditional media companies to fund large staffs of full-time journalists. The Seattle PI is considering going entirely online with a small staff, but the council committee (and the newspaper guilds, of course) didn’t seemed too interested in exploring that as a solution. After all, how can the quality of journalism be maintained when dozens of journalists are let go? Here are a few ideas worth exploring: content-sharing arrangements, pooling (do we really need 15 journalists at a press conference?), short-form “as it happens” reporting, networked neighborhood news sites (more on that in a second), freelance journalist networks, focused citizen contribution, empowered community conversation, etc. Sure, I think we’d all love to have large staffs of journalists, but it’s not an economic reality and not a viable strategy moving forward. So let’s move on and get creative.
3. “We had better start asking questions and realizing that the loss of the P-I, among others, would be a staggering loss to our community and a direct assault on the American people’s right to know.” (That’s from Congressman Jim McDermott.)
First of all, there’s the Seattle Times, four TV newsrooms and an all-news radio station in town. Then there’s two dozen neighborhood news sites, a dozen neighborhood newspapers, two alt weeklies with aggressive websites and a handful of niche news sites like Crosscut.com and the Puget Sound Business Journal, to name a few. People now go directly to national sites like msnbc.com for their national and international news. And whatever vacuum is created by the loss of the PI (and potentially the Times, as it’s in deep financial trouble) — just like any industry before it — will be filled by existing competitors and new start-ups.
4. So what about all these “blogs.” Are they “professional journalists?” How do we know they’re accurate? They might hear an explosion and post that “we’ve been bombed.” (Yes, that was a quote from a councilmember.)
This is when I about fell out of my chair. Seattle, as I’ve written before, is on the cutting edge of online neighborhood news with over two dozen sites and counting. (Please note these neighborhood sites are not like most neighborhood blogs: we actively cover the news.) About half of these are from people who have worked as traditional journalists at some point over their careers, like Tracy Record and me. The others, like Amber Campbell of RainierValleyPost, taught herself journalism, covering her lower-income, high-crime neighborhood with a depth and conviction that no newspaper or TV station in town can match. After all, when there’s a gang shooting, TV stations go live at 11 p.m. and drop the story the next day. Campbell hits the street in her own neighborhood, talks to families and looks for answers. Is she not a professional journalist? Hell yes, she is.
Brewster put it this way to the council: “Relax a bit.”
Because at the end of the day, neighborhood news sites that stretch the truth will alienate their audiences and become insignificant. The ones that get it right will grow in credibility, loyalty and audience.
5. These neighborhood news sites are “entertaining…”
WestSeattleBlog and many other neighborhood news sites in Seattle, like the site run by my wife and me, MyBallard.com, feature straightforward, issue-driven original coverage. But we also cover new restaurants, quirky neighborhood events and the occasional lost pet. We have a lower threshold of news, covering the small stuff in a couple lines. That’s why people come to us: for down-the-street content they can’t get anywhere else, because the newspapers and TV stations aren’t covering it.
5. “…but I haven’t seen you out here covering the city council.” (A councilmember directing a question to Record).
When you think about it, if every major Seattle neighborhood has a neighborhood news site (at the current rate, it will within a year) the unique daily stories produced in aggregate would be greater than both the Seattle Times and the PI combined (because those two papers overlap on a large number of stories). The breadth of coverage is greater, but you could argue there’s a gap here: in-depth and/or investigative stories associated with city hall, state government, etc. So you might imagine a streamlined, online-only newspaper that focuses on “core” beat coverage, leaving the neighborhood news sites to cover the “spokes” of neighborhood news and issues. And as I wrote on Lost Remote several months ago, you might imagine some intersection of the two. Or, perhaps the neighborhood news sites pool their resources to share freelance beat reporters. Hmmm.
And for the record, Record has covered the city council.
6. How can newspapers reinvent themselves online? Do neighborhood news sites have a sustainable business model? How might all this come together?
They didn’t ask those questions. But they should have. Instead, one participant bemoaned the “loss of the public sphere,” which was downright hilarious given the fact the meeting was being streamed live as well as live-blogged on a popular Seattle site. And the fact that Record had her laptop open, Twittering back and forth with a few folks in the audience and me, sitting at my desk. Loss of the public sphere? To the contrary. Media coverage of the past was closed-loop and out-of-reach and exclusive, severely less public than today. But as one co-worker suggested to me today, perhaps politicians feel threatened by the explosion of media voices: they can track and respond to a half-dozen news organizations — people and brands they know — but what happens when there’s hundreds of bloggers and thousands of tweets flying all over the place? Who’s “professional?” It moves fast. Too fast to “manage.” But democracy will live on. In fact, it will only get stronger.
As far as whether neighborhood news sites have a sustainable business model, I’m hopeful. The WestSeattleBlog is generating enough revenue to cover two full-time people and hire freelancers. Some argue it’s an anomaly, but our MyBallard.com network is growing leaps and bounds. After all, neighborhood news sites — which provide a layer of journalism over an empowered community — have an extremely low cost footprint, have an avid base of contributors, drive a large number of pageviews from user-submitted content, are developing quality business relationships with small businesses and most of all, are extremely relevant and truly unique.
Of course, there are many other ideas besides neighborhood news sites. That’s what we should be talking about, asking ourselves time and time again, is there a sustainable business model here? How can we leverage technology to connect an audience with local businesses in deeply meaningful ways? Because that’s the journalism problem that needs to be solved.
I’ll end with a moment of Zen. A quote fragment from Licata:
“I could register 50 hits with a physical newspaper.”
(Full disclosure: I was invited to speak at this event, but due to the last-minute nature of the request with my busy schedule, I was unable to attend.)
