Tom Grubisich
Washington, D.C. 
I write about hyperlocal grassroots sites regularly for Online Journalism Review. What I've seen checking out proliferating sites has not been encouraging. The content is generally dull "happy news" or aggregated wire stories and doesn't seem to tap into what's special about the communities being covered.
I am senior web editor at the World Bank in Washington, D.C., where I help develop blogs and other content aimed at broadening the Bank's audiences around the world.
Earlier in my career, I was managing editor of news for Digital City/AOL and before that co-founder of the free-circulation weekly Connection Newspapers in Northern Virginia. Earlier yet, I was a reporter and editor at The Washington Post. For more information, consult, Who's Who in America (2008 edition). I'm reachable at TomEditor@msn.com.
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These articles are the work of their author, and do not necessarily reflect the opinion of nor an assignment by OJR.
October 23, 2009
The new report
"The Reconstruction of American Journalism" by Leonard Downie Jr. and Michael Schudson is one more example of what what's wrong with the debate about the future of journalism. The Columbia Journalism School-sponsored report shovels out overviews, conclusions and recommendations by the pound, but with barely a few grams' worth of critical thinking. Jan Schaffer, in her reaction to Downie and Schudson, said it best:
"Darts for the mile-high, inch-deep reportage." Schaffer, who is executive director of American University's
J-Lab: The Institute for Interactive Journalism and Pulitzer Prize-winning former reporter and business editor at the Philadelphia Inquirer, zeroes in on the report's fatal weakness:
"If we really want to reconstruct American journalism, we need to look at more than the supply side; we need to explore the demand side, too. We need to start paying attention to the trail of clues in the new media ecosystem and follow those 'breadcrumbs.' What ailing industry would look for a fix that only thinks of 'us,' the news suppliers, and not 'them,' the news consumers? I don't hear from any of those consumers in this report."
Alan D. Mutter, whose Reflections of a Newsosaur blog, provides a good share of the small amount of rigorous, economic-centered thinking that's gone into the journalism crisis, also gave a mostly scathing review to "The Reconstruction of American Journalism."
Downie and Schudson come to their drastic recommendation of a "National Fund for Local News" using the kind of sleeves-rolled-up but shallow analysis that typically informs newspaper editorials on big issues (e.g., health care reform and the U.S. role in Afghanistan) More...
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August 28, 2009
Every day, the debate over health-care reform grows hotter – but newspapers and their websites are
doing little to shape the outcome. This is not just journalistic failure, but also abdication of public responsibility. For all their cost cutting, newspapers still have the editorial resources to take ownership of how big local issues are covered – and health care is, above all, local. As four doctors who are health-care-reform advocates wrote in a
New York Times op-ed on Aug. 13:
“...all medicine is local. And until a community confronts what goes on in its own population — to the point of actually seeking the data and engaging those who can solve the problem — nothing will change.”
The doctors examined 306 “Hospital Referral Regions” – which cluster hospitals used by most residents in their metro areas – and found that 74 of them met the doctors’ criteria for “more effective, lower-cost care.” Rich documentation about wide disparities in costs in hospital referral regions can be easily accessed at the Dartmouth Atlas of Health Care. Thedata can be repurposed into charts and other easy-to-grasp visuals that pinpoint high costs at one or more hospitals and lower costs at other hospitals within the same metro area. This should be the starting point for newspaper coverage helping people to locate one of the crucial drivers of runaway costs: the availability of doctor-owned care-referral centers.
But go to newspaper websites today, and you won’t find them helping their communities understand this economic calculus of health care. I recently browsed five sites in metro areas that have the highest cost care, and only one site – the Miami Herald -- was even taking a stab at owning coverage of the issue. More...
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August 21, 2009
The
LA Times website used to remind me of an old-fashioned hardware store – things were plopped wherever there seemed to be space. That changed when Meredith Artley took over as editor of the site in early 2007.
Under Artley, latimes.com quickly became a leader in design and featuring content that celebrates the special qualities of its metro area. So why is the site’s new design, despite some welcome improvements, specked with so many mistakes?
The gray (screened) type is gone, thank goodness, but it has been replaced by type that, because of the limited way it’s used, produces an even grayer look that extends to the entire layout:
The new typeface is Georgia, a serif version of Verdana, which Microsoft commissioned early on for its online readability. Georgia, which was inspired by Times Roman, is fine, but not when, everywhere, it is uniformly presented in regular font. More...
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August 5, 2009
Helpless to stop their print world from being pulped, newspapers are blowing a golden opportunity to use the Web to recapture relevance and audience. The occasion is a story that impacts every man, woman and child in America – health care and how to universalize quality without busting the entire U.S. economy.
News about health-care reform is, obviously, all over the media, including newspaper websites, 24/7, but too much of it has a Washington dateline when, in fact, the issue is basically local. People seek care where they live, not on either end of Pennsylvania Avenue NW or on K Street NW in Washington. Newspapers and their websites, with their still formidable local resources, should own this story as the locus shifts to their backyards. More...
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July 8, 2009
Former Washington Post staffer and frequent OJR contributor Tom Grubisich checks in with his take on the recent near-scandal at the Post - the paper's attempt to sell access to its reporters and editors through high-priced, off-the-record "salons" at the publisher's home. After Tom makes his points, OJR editor Robert Niles jumps in and adds additional thoughts on how this episode ought to provide inspiration to news publishers trying to preserve and extend healthy relationships with their readers.
The most surprising thing about the Washington Post's pay-to-play fiasco was not the Jack Abramoff-worthy pitch (“Underwriting Opportunity: An evening with the right people can alter the debate. Underwrite and participate in this intimate and exclusive Washington Post Salon, an off-the-record dinner and discussion at the home of CEO and Publisher Katharine Weymouth....”), but that the Post was wasting its time on a brand-building project that ignored the potential firepower of its nine-million-user-strong website.
Could any brand building be more ridiculously behind the curve than salons at the home of the publisher? Weymouth's grandmother, Katharine Graham, was known for her Georgetown salons, but in-between those evenings she did things like hire Ben Bradlee to create a first-class newspaper, took the Post public but without the Graham family yielding corporate control to Wall Street, and, while the new public company's financial future hung in the balance, pledged the Post's fortune and sacred honor by standing solidly behind the initially risky Watergate coverage of young reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein. Talk about brand building! More...
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June 10, 2009
Proliferating blogs and micro-sites are producing so much local news, hard and soft, that the continuing shrinkage and even death of metro papers will leave no troubling void in metro coverage, Mark Potts
concludes in an extensively linked post on his Recovering Journalist blog. Potts comes close to putting metros collectively in the past tense. They can't make a successful transition from print to the Internet, he says, because all they offer are “your basic one-size-fits all metro newspaper Web site.”
But in this case the one size – large – is the right one. The metros' problem is they don't know how to exploit their size. For all their cutbacks, surviving metros still have considerable staff and other resources that could be mobilized to do what sweat-equity blogs and micro-sites can't do nearly as well or at all.
Metros must become like Gulliver – not the shipwrecked Gulliver who is ensnared by the six-inch-high Lilliputians, but the Gulliver who later outwitted his captors and escaped to freedom. For all their cutbacks, surviving metro newspapers, online or in print, still have considerable staff and other resources that could be mobilized to do what sweat-equity blogs and micro-sites can’t yet do nearly as well, or at all.
Gulliver got smart. Will the ensnared metros? More...
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May 26, 2009
Google CEO Eric Schmidt has tauntingly
suggested that newspapers could keep their stories out of the search engine's omnivorous maw by the simple expedient of inserting a line of anti-spidering robot text. But newspapers don't have to commit hara-kiri to keep others from making a free lunch (and breakfast, dinner and snacks) out of their expensively produced content.
Yet so far they haven't been creative enough to exploit the potential of having their stories turning up as links on the heavily-trafficked Google News homepage. In her recent testimony [PDF] at a Senate committee hearing on "The Future of Journalism," Google Vice President for User Experience Marissa Mayer gave a virtual tutorial on how newspapers could do that. More...
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March 6, 2009
Book lovers mourned, some angrily, the Washington Post's decision to
kill off its free-standing Book World, which, until Feb. 22, was part of the paper's Sunday print package. But the good news was the Post's promise that the estimable literary section would stay alive online. "We intend to develop a strong, easy-to-navigate, well indexed Book World site," new Post Executive Editor Marcus Brauchli (who wielded the ax)
wrote in a response to the 122 Book World contributors who
protested the decision.
But just how "strong" will Book World be online?
When the Los Angeles Times eliminated its free-standing print Sunday Book Review in 2008 as part of its nonstop cost-cutting, the section was reincarnated online as Books in the Living section of the Times website. In addition to reviews, book-sale reports and a literary calendar, Books features a blog called Jacket Copy. But the blog, with its multiple authors, lacks personality. Overall, the online Books isn't capitalizing on the strengths of the Web – particularly community building – and it doesn't seem to have preserved the critical authority that was a hallmark of the print Book Review. Browsing through the skimpy site, you get the feeling it's produced on a shoestring. There is no Steve Wasserman or Digby Diehl – past editors of the Book Review – setting and executing high standards. More...
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