David Westphal: October 2008 archive
The state of independent local online news, part 5: Outsourcing as a path to profitability?
October 31, 2008
[Editor's note: This is day five of OJR's a week-long look at the state of independent local online news start-ups. Each day's report will include a feature article, as well as a Q&A with one or more of the day's sources. If you missed the first three installments, here they are:Part 1: Sites on the rise; business models remain elusive
Part 2: Experience makes MinnPost a top online new startup
Part 3: No paper? No problem! News companies use the Web to enter new markets
Part 4: Seeking consistency from grassroots reporting]
James Macpherson learned a lesson last year when kicked up a journalism fuss over plans to outsource reporting on his Pasadena website to journalists in India.
"Never get talked out of your instincts," he told me in a phone interview. When he forgot that adage, he said, "I got in the hole really fast."
Macpherson, who's run the news website "Pasadena Now" for the last four years, was so shaken by the criticism he received over his outsourcing plan that he immediately hired four reporters in what he said was an attempt to prove his journalism bona fides.
Macpherson said he almost immediately began losing money. "We did a great job. But it cost $5,000 a week… There was no way I could pay for it."
So Macpherson got rid of the reporters and went back to his outsourcing plan, which he says is working. More...
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The state of independent local online news, part 4: Seeking consistency from grassroots reporting
October 30, 2008
[Editor's note: This is day four of OJR's a week-long look at the state of independent local online news start-ups. Each day's report will include a feature article, as well as a Q&A with one or more of the day's sources. If you missed the first three installments, here they are:Part 1: Sites on the rise; business models remain elusive
Part 2: Experience makes MinnPost a top online new startup
Part 3: No paper? No problem! News companies use the Web to enter new markets]
If the future of news is ultra-local, then ChiTown Daily News is gambling in the right direction.
The operators of the three-year-old news operation are counting on interest in Chicago's 77 neighborhoods to bring readers to their nonprofit site, staffed almost entirely with citizen journalists.
The results so far are inconclusive. Traffic is building, but only recently passed the 25,000 mark on monthly unique visitors. (The Chicago Tribune's monthly audience is about 150 times larger.) And the work of the citizen journalists, while often surprisingly good, is uneven.
"Performance and longevity have varied widely, and wildly," editor and CEO Geoff Dougherty told me in an e-mail. "Some of the original crew is still with us; others drop out before writing an article." But Dougherty added: "I have been enormously surprised by the quality of work that some of our people do – we get great stories this way."
The site's work has been bankrolled mainly by a two-year, $340,000 Knight Foundation grant that saluted its pioneering attempt. "Nobody has attempted to create an organized, cohesive system that enables coverage of a large city," Knight said in announcing the grant.
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The state of independent local online news, part 3: No paper? No problem! News companies use the Web to enter new markets
October 29, 2008
[Editor's note: This is day three of OJR's a week-long look at the state of independent local online news start-ups. Each day's report will include a feature article, as well as a Q&A with one or more of the day's sources. If you missed the first two installment, here they are:Part 1: Sites on the rise; business models remain elusive
Part 2: Experience makes MinnPost a top online new startup]
In the spring of 2005, Morris Publications tried something new: It started a website in Bluffton, S.C., a town where it had no newspaper, in a bid for market share via the Internet.
Now GateHouse Media Inc. is trying something similar. Last May, GateHouse launched a community website in Batavia, N.Y., where the Batavia Daily News was firmly established as the local newspaper.
Howard Owens, GateHouse's director of digital publishing, told the International Journal of Newspaper Technology that GateHouse wasn't seeing The Batavian as a newspaper replacement.
But when I asked Owens about The Batavian's mission, he indicated that newspapers may be vulnerable because of an inability to change quickly enough. More...
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The state of independent local online news, part 2: Experience makes MinnPost a top online new startup
October 28, 2008
[Editor's note: This is day two of OJR's a week-long look at the state of independent local online news start-ups. Each day's report will include a feature article, as well as a Q&A with one or more of the day's sources. If you missed the first installment, here it is: The state of independent local online news, part 1: Sites on the rise; business models remain elusive]Take newspapers' classic strengths of in-depth reporting and high-quality writing. Convert to an online-only operation.
You've got MinnPost.
The nonprofit Minneapolis news site, written mainly by free-lancers who formerly worked for one of the big Twin Cities dailies, is the largest and one of the strongest of the startup websites focusing on local and regional news.
But like everyone else occupying the space of online-only community news, MinnPost founder and editor Joel Kramer finds the business model elusive.
The strength of the Twin Cities market – it has the country's most literate and civically engaged population – also turns into a liability, because Minneapolis/St. Paul is jam-packed with local news outlets of every stripe.
MinnPost wasn't even the first entry in the Twin Cities' online-only news space. Jeremy Iggers launched the Twin Cities Daily Planet in May 2006 as a hybrid of community news written by professional and citizen journalists. Between other online players like Minnesota Independent and dozens of other news websites, there are too many ad sales people chasing too few Web advertisers.
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Sites on the rise: Business models remain elusive
October 27, 2008
[Editor's note: Today OJR begins a week-long look at the state of independent local online news start-ups. Each day's report will include a feature article, as well as a Q&A with one or more of the day's sources. In addition, at the end of today's entry, you will find links to and information about many of the websites we'll be examining this week.]SAN DIEGO – The 10 reporters, editors and photographers working out of a small office on a former military base here represent some of journalism's brightest hopes.
The nearly four-year-old website they work for, the nonprofit Voice of San Diego, is doing some of the best and liveliest muckraking reporting of any Web-only news staff in the country.
Mostly former newspaper reporters, the Voice's staffers have rattled off a string of exposes that has grabbed the attention of the city's power structure. They think their site will prove not only that local journalism can thrive on the Web, but that their enterprise can grow many times over as mainstream media continue to decline.
There's just one thing missing: a business model. Even with a small operation like this – 10 people reporting about the nation's eighth-largest city – it's not clear whether sustained funding will materialize.
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Hunt for a new media business model: The radical is no longer so radical
October 24, 2008
Thursday's conference in New York on New Business Models for News reminded me of an adage I used to read in The Des Moines Register: "There is no solution. Seek it lovingly."As you'd expect, the gathering at CUNY's journalism school produced no Eureka! moment that announced itself as the solution for what ails most media companies. (As if on cue, newspaper companies were reporting third-quarter earnings declines of 16-19 percent throught the week.)
There was some news on the seek-it-lovingly front, however. Our host, the dynamic Jeff Jarvis, said the meeting of about 100 new and old-media folks marked significant progress because there were no head-in-the-sand protests from mainstream veterans about the need for a new business model. Nobody flinched even at prescriptions like getting rid of editors, dumping the story forum, or banishing newsrooms. (I don't mean everyone agreed with those ideas. But comfortable with the idea of radical change? Clearly.) More...
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Steven Smith departs and the question arises: Who should lead newspapers' online transformation?
October 7, 2008
Do newspaper editors have a special obligation to stay in their depleted newsrooms and continue the fight, even as staff cuts threaten to shrink legacy news-gathering operations? Or will newspapers and their Web sites be better served by new leadership that's less wedded to the past and more inclined to see the future as hopeful?This was the topic of a lively conversation among some journalism faculty last week at USC Annenberg, following Steve A. Smith's decision to resign as editor of the Spokane Spokesman-Review. Smith's announcement (followed by the same-day exit of assistant managing editor Carla Savalli) was deeply felt here because of his pioneering involvement in digital transformation, here at the Knight Digital Media Center as well as at Spokane. But Smith told Michele McLellan last week that he could not stomach an additional, 25 percent cut to his news staff. “The journalism that’s important to me is no longer possible,” he told McLellan.
There can't have been too many editors who haven't wondered the same thing, and asked themselves whether it's best for them to stay or to go. More...
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