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.
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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February 11, 2009
The
New York Times should indeed use its website to generate more revenue – but not by charging for any part of its presently all-free daily report. Executive Editor Bill Keller's
recent ruminations on the touchy subject of paid content have led to
speculation that the dearly departed
Times Select will be reincarnated in some more palatable form. Times Select required users to start paying for the paper's columnists and some other stories. It threw in as a sweetener the paper's archives going back to the 19th century. But most of the millions of nytimes.com users decided they wouldn't pay for content they'd been getting for free.
A confidential memo from multimedia publishing pioneer Steve Brill obtained by Romenesko argues that the Times should "[flip] the Web's lethal dynamics" and start charging for online content. Under Brill's elaborate pricing scheme – you have to read his whole, alternately maddening and inspired memo – nytimes.com visitors would pay $55 a year to get access to all content. Search engines and aggregation sites would continue to get free access to the headline and first paragraph of each story – to help keep nytimes.com relevant as an information source on the Internet. Brill, who unsuccessfully tried to sell paid content with his Brill's Content during the dot.com boom/bust, acknowledges in his memo "all of this may seem unrealistic," but nonetheless concludes, "There is no alternative."
Times Select was a bust, as was Brill's Content. But there's another way for the Times to exploit the potential of its website to raise needed revenue that advertising by itself can't bring. More...
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January 14, 2009
[Editor's note: Tom Grubisich is a former Washington Post reporter and editor]The Washington Post does great journalism. Jonathan Krim, assistant managing editor/ local at washingtonpost.com, documents several examples in his response to my recent piece "Washington Post needs to do some structural work on its shaky new strategy." Except Krim mislabeled this journalism as a serious attempt at "deeper and broader [community] engagement." It isn't.
The best example that Krim cited – "Fixing D.C.'s Schools" – actually shows how the Post, particularly its website, remains stuck in this great paper's legacy of investigative journalism, where the investigators, who are word, not action, people, remain in total control. The series, put together by a team of 12 reporters, editors, videographers and others, was a devastating indictment of how the District public schools educate their students. But the articles, fine as they are, offer no avenues of help to District parents who have children in one of the worst public school systems in the country. More...
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January 7, 2009
[Editor's note: Tom Grubisich is a former Washington Post reporter and editor]In her first major statement as publisher of the Washington Post, Katharine Weymouth late last year announced a seemingly Zen-inspired long-term strategy of three pillars. The pillar that caught my attention was the second:
"Providing utility, engagement, and convenience for our local readers."
"Engagement"! Weymouth gets it, I said to myself, the Post is going to build a 21st century community to stay relevant, and financially healthy.
But after reading her whole "The Road Forward" document, I think my optimism may be misplaced.
Weymouth details what the Post will do about utility ("make the paper and washingtonpost.com go-to places for local information") and convenience ("make it possible for [local consumers] to complete many... transactions on the site"). But nowhere does Weymouth expand on how the Post will promote engagement. More...
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December 3, 2008
The New York Times Co. -- the whole caboodle, including the esteemed and necesssary flagship paper, 18 other, mostly monopoly dailies, the spunky About instructional search engine and minority ownership of the half-redeemed Boston Red Sox -- is worth less than what the company paid for just one of its properties, the Boston Globe. That's what the stock market said as of Wednesday, Nov. 26, and that was after a bounceback from a near-historic low -- $5.34 – on Nov. 21.
With advertising in its print edition continuing to slide by double-digit percentages, the Times is pursuing, in the words of President/CEO Janet L. Robinson, a "strict cost discipline." But, happily, it's looking as if the company finally understands that it can't cut its way back to financial health (and a stock price that doesn't look like an unfortunate misprint).
In August 2007, when the company's stock had already fallen to a 12-year low, I argued in these pages that the Times could fight back by leveraging the power of its nytimes.com website through the force of social networking. Finally, it's begun doing so. More...
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June 9, 2008
The headline on the Wall Street Journal story about the Washington Post's widely watched venture in local-local journalism on the Web was unambiguous: "
Big Daily's Hyperlocal Flop."
So how bad actually is LoudounExtra.com? Let's look.
On the LoudounExtra homepage, I am greeted with this above-the-fold spread:
My squinting eyes try to read the reverse-type blurb, but before I can finish, a new image/blurb is automatically rotated in the space.
After figuring out how to retrieve the original blurb, I pull up the story. Big mistake. More...
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