OJR: The Online Journalism Review
September 7, 2010
By Daniela Gerson
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Facing City Hall in
Alhambra, California, a predominantly Asian and Latino suburb just east of Los Angeles, a life-size bronze statue of a man sits holding a newspaper. A plaque says the statue is dedicated to the memory of
Warner Jenkins, "Alhambra's beloved journalist/chronicler." That is the closest a journalist gets to Alhambra's City Hall most days. Local news coverage in the municipality of roughly 90,000 is severely lacking. What exists tends to be in Chinese or crime coverage in the area's larger dailies.
USC's Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, responding to the dearth of reporting on Alhambra and the challenge of creating a media outlet in an ethnically and linguistically diverse area, launched the Alhambra Project in 2008. Michael Parks, former director of the journalism school and former editor of the Los Angeles Times, and Sandra Ball-Rokeach, a communication researcher and director of the Metamorphosis Project, collaborated with support from the Annenberg Foundation. Parks was interested in investigating how local news coverage could better serve communities. Ball-Rokeach, whose research had previously found that the Alhambra area had one of the lowest levels of civic engagement in Los Angeles County, wanted to explore how creating a news product grounded in local needs could improve that level of engagement.
I joined the project in early summer of last year. As a journalist with a background in immigration reporting – and with a smattering of community organizing skills, including managing a Brooklyn farmer's market and running a small non-profit magazine – my assignment was to take the research ideas and help translate them into an online news source grounded in local needs.
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More about: grassroots journalism, journalism education
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September 3, 2010
By Robert Niles
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Last week, I wrote about
my skepticism of Patch.com, based on my assumption that the economies of scale available to a national chain of local publications online were no longer enough to overcome to the inherent cost advantages enjoyed by locally-owned publications.
Locally-owned publications don't have to generate enough income to support regional managers and national executives. And if they're boot-strapped, they don't have to pay back VC or investors, either. That gives a local start-up a huge cost advantage in what's become a brutal online publishing market.
If you're going to start an investor-funded national chain of local news websites, you're going to need to achieve some economies of scale that allow you to make enough extra income - as a chain - to overcome the cost advantage enjoyed by your locally-owned competitors. I dismissed several such ways that newspaper chains achieved that in the past, arguing that they'd been made irrelevant by the Internet. But a reader challenged me: Are there any economies of scale that could help make a national chain of local online news sites profitable?
Hey, I love a challenge. So here are two I thought of this week:
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More about: AOL, entrepreneurial journalism, grassroots journalism
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September 1, 2010
By Robert Niles
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Last week, news reports hit that the
University of Colorado at Boulder would close its journalism school. By the end of the afternoon, the story had morphed a bit - CU wouldn't be getting out of journalism education, but instead convening a commission to look at restructuring the school,
putting its future as a separate entity in question.
(By the way, does anyone have an explanation why several of the former Big Eight schools transpose their initials? How does the "University of Colorado" become CU? I digress....)
Colorado's earned harsh criticism for the way it handled this announcement. Students, alumni and community members can't rally around uncertainty. Yes, journalism education needs to evolve as the industry also must, in response to the economic disruption the Internet has brought to the field. But if Colorado administrators couldn't have offered a specific plan for the future of journalism education at their institution, I'd argue they'd have served their community better by opening up their decision-making process, instead of putting forth closing the school as their primary option. Why leave your students and faculty hanging like this, especially when none of them will be on the commission deciding the school's fate?
Still, every college and university that teaches journalism must be prepared to address some tough questions about the future of journalism education. For that, Colorado's not alone.
A personal note: I've had some experience with university restructuring, having served as one of five student members of a 23-member student/faculty/administration task force charged with revamping Northwestern University's undergraduate division back in 1988. Done right, this is tough work that stirs up conflict right away, but in the hope of securing long-term stability for an institution.
I see three huge challenges facing higher education today, challenges that aren't unique to any journalism school.
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More about: journalism education
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August 27, 2010
By Robert Niles
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AOL is
rolling out its Patch.com "hyperlocal" network around the country. Having watched similar efforts since Microsoft launched Sidewalk in the 1990s, I remain skeptical.
Look, we all agree by now that the Internet's changed the economics of the publishing business. One of the ways that's happened, however, makes it much more difficult to create a workable business model for a national network of local websites.
Why? Let's try this question for an example: How much money does Howard Owens at TheBatavian.com have to ship out at the end of the month to his national corporate bosses?
Of course, owner-operated sites like Howard's don't have to share any of their earnings with a national corporation. Nor do they have to pay for national and regional bureaucracies that oversee the network of local sites. Everything a local news website publisher earns goes right into that local news website.
That gives independent publishers a huge cost advantage over their corporate competition. So why did the newspaper industry evolve toward national corporate ownership?
Because of the economies of scale that used to exist in the newspaper business. A larger chain could get a better deal on syndication contracts. It could centralize design and IT work and share national bureaus, reducing duplication of effort. It could employ a national sales team, earning more income than individual, local papers could get on their own.
But the Internet's changed those opportunities.
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More about: AOL, entrepreneurial journalism, grassroots journalism
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August 24, 2010
By Brian McDermott
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The Ground Zero mosque does not exist.
There is, of course, the planned Park51 Muslim community center and mosque, which local authorities approved for construction on Park Place in lower Manhattan about two blocks, or about 600 feet, from Ground Zero.
And there is also, of course, a myth - the latest outrage brand- of a "Ground Zero mosque." Headlines from dozens of outlets have trumpeted that three-word shorthand, tempered at best by the flimsy embrace of quotation marks. Yet the phrase "Ground Zero mosque" violates the most basic tenets of journalism: be truthful and be accurate.
So what's false? Simple: the mosque in question will not be built at Ground Zero. To conflate the lingering psychological toll of the destroyed World Trade Center with a building 600 feet away is as absurd as calling the Lace Gentlemen's Club on 7th Avenue in Manhattan the "Fox News Strip Club" by virtue of its two-block proximity to Fox's headquarters.
Speaking to Michael Calderone at Yahoo News, AP New York assistant chief Chad Roedemeier said that the slug on the story has always been "Ground Zero mosque," and that phrase has often appeared in headlines. But he said the wire service has always said the mosque was "near" ground zero in stories. (I used to work as a freelance photographer with the AP in New York City.)
That distinction isn't good enough in an age of six-word iPhone headlines, warp speed online skimming, and well-financed PR and political hucksters trying to smoke-bomb plain languge. Whether it's birthers, Breitbart, or BP, there will always be cynical and reductive operators trying to exploit the uninformed in the age of too much information. The question is why responsible media doesn't fight as aggressively to reframe stories with the facts.
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More about: ethics, writing
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