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Mar
21
Tom Hespos’ search for information about an accident that killed a family friend of his significant other leads to nothing but lamentations on the paucity of news available. This excerpt of his story comes from Hespos’s MediaPost’s Online Spin blog. He is President of Underscore Marketing.
The mainstream media really wasn’t much help to me while I was vacationing. Since I wasn’t running around like my usual crazy self, I began to really notice the mainstream media’s shortcomings. As a former journalism major and newspaper editor, I found myself asking why there were no stories covering some of the things I noticed. For instance, a mysterious algae bloom had taken over the lake behind my father’s place. My dad said the same algae typically shows up at the end of the summer, but for some unexplained reason, it was months early this year. At one point, we saw people spraying chemicals into the lake to kill the algae, but I noticed that many of the people in the community had no idea what was going on. No one seemed to know what the algae was, who the people were who were spraying it, why it was here early this year, or what caused it. You’d think something like that would be covered by the local paper or on the local news. We didn’t hear anything and couldn’t find anything.
These things made me think of my newspaper days –about how we would make judgments about which stories to run and which to bump or cut. The number of ad pages would dictate how much editorial we would be able to run. Of course, the newspaper had to be an even number of pages. We had both business and space constraints on what was considered newsworthy and what wasn’t. Sometimes, you would have to cut the story on what the Garden Club was doing because a major story came up close to deadline.
With linear media, that will always be the case. Newspapers will always have a column-inch limit on what they can run, ad-edit ratios to adhere to and a limited number of news reporters. Radio and television broadcasts will always be limited to short sound bites, 30-minute newscasts and commercial pods of a certain length.
Of course, these constraints don’t exist in non-linear media–the content that everyday people can create and distribute. A podcast can be any length. So can a blog post. One doesn’t need to cut three-and-a-half minutes of film down to 15 seconds in a video log, or crop a huge color photograph so it can be printed at a smaller size on the front page of a newspaper.
The constraints are gone. And the learning curve is simply not as steep as it once was. The publishing playing field has been leveled out for us.
But one of the most interesting factors driving the citizen publishing movement is that there is plenty to cover. The mainstream media miss a lot of things. There are plenty of stories that don’t have the mass appeal to draw readership in the city newspaper, but that would appeal to a large number of people online.
Perhaps that is one of the major drivers behind citizen-publishing–that it fills an informational void left by the mainstream media. I see this in action almost every day with the part-time blogging I do. I often get notes of thanks from people who read things on my blog that they hadn’t read about anywhere else.
Maybe one day each of us will have ready access to some sort of publishing forum that has the potential to reach as many people as are interested in the subject matter of the pieces we publish. Each one of us could be a journalist to one extent or another.
The NEO blogosphere emits proof of these facts everyday. See Meet the Bloggers, Creative Ink
Working with Words, Pho’s Akron Pages, Word of Mouth and many more doing original research and writing.
Btw, has anyone every tried to create a repository blog for all the first-person citizen journalism produced in the NEO sphere?
By Jill Miller Zimon at 4:55 pm March 21st, 2006 in Politics
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9 Responses to “Former newspaper editor: blogs fill informational void left by MSM”
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Sometimes we miss these things, especially living in large media markets where there’s a ton of competition. But there are still plenty of newsworthy things that get missed. I think it’s just more obvious in smaller markets.
I grew up in a small town on Long Island (Wading River – in fact, I still have a residence there) and that’s where I started my first newspaper. Even with one paper firmly established in that small hamlet at the time, no one was telling a lot of the positive stories about the community – the existing paper was mostly gloom and doom.
I don’t know if I’d start the paper if I had to do it over again in today’s competitive landscape. I’d probably just start a community site with a message board and a blog, and take care of the push component by offering e-mail newsletters and RSS feeds. Maybe I’d get a few volunteers to start blogging.
-TFH
Tom, Thanks for reading and leaving a comment.
So – snap opinion: can these “converged” providers of news be successful as for profits, or do you think they’ll always be minor, tangential resources run by folks, like myself, who just have a passion to do it?
I think the converged media could work, as tools demand less “passion” (aka sleep deprivation and work).
You idea for a clearinghouse for Ohio political reportage is neat. I wonder if it should consist merely of links and excerpt, with the risk of blog permalinks going away some years in the future, or exist like the current news collections in libraries. My worry is if it’s left to one person, when they die/retire from keeping it, it falls apart.
If it already existed, would you like something like a news database, with a Wikipedia like format to allow commentary?
Well, I imagine that some people would say that through Technorati or sites like Leftyblogs, we already can get a compendium. But I’m thinking more in terms of the original reportage, like Wendy Hoke has done, and even Tim Russo’s Democracy Guy tales, the Meet the Bloggers stuff, and all the first-person investigating and reporting back blog posts.
I imagine we could tag them, if there were some universal tagging system that could see that it’s reportage from NEO or something. I don’t know – I’m kind of lame when it comes to computer knowledge, but I’m pretty good with coming up with ideas.
Thanks Jill, I am humbled to be included in that group.
Your repository blog idea is a great one. BFD gets the closest to that concept, I think, although that is not (I don’t think) George’s intention for his blog.
One of our local papers out here has started what it calls “a blog” – I would truly love to see them integrate their MSM format with a BFD model – editors pointing readers to local blog entries of interest, so that a full continuum of information is made available to readers, and then discussion can ensue on those topics. The PD’s blog section really has not been able to get to that point yet. Newspapers can’t cover everything that goes on – but with our numbers, “we” can, or at least come close.
It’s a concept that I think is ripe for the picking – given all legal parameters are worked out in advance. In fact I have offered to quit my day job to take this over for them….
No bites yet.
Hey Scott -
Maybe you’ve seen this, but the Washington Post is using Technorati to direct readers of specific articles to the blogs that are writing about that article. That’s not exactly what I’m talking about, or what I think you’re talking about either, but it’s a shortcut way for the WaPo to make it look like they’re trying to integrate, I think.
Real integration would be, as you suggest, something like cleveland.com providing the news from whichever source provides it, whether that is the PD, the Sun papers, etc. or blogs. But I do have in my mind that even such info from the blogs would be “segregated” or categorized – to separate the more pure opinion from the reportorial that is local news not otherwise covered. Kind of the way op-ed columnists, or columnists in general are separated from news – I’d want readers to know so that they can choose whether to read a more investigative piece, or an opinion piece (otherwise known as a rant!).
It is ripe, isn’t it?
Good luck getting that post – seriously – if I had the time…or made the time, I think this is so worthy of a proposal to an entity like J-lab.
Hey Jill,
Check this out from yesterday’s E-Media Tidbits. Speaks to what we’ve been discussing this week, no?
To sum up: “Let’s face it, analog needs digital. And vice versa.”
We know more than a few folks for whom that is a MUST READ. Have it in your purse tomorrow, no??
I think a new business model will rise out of social search that will make things a bit easier for folks who want to contribute to local news-gathering through blogs or blog-like channels. I think all it needs is an aggregator (could be Google, could be a number of other companies) and a fair compensation model based on viewership.