Tom Grubisich: June 2009 archive
How metro newsrooms can recapture their local dominance
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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