THINK! helps the thought process

Today, I'll start by referencing a great (although dusty) post by THINK! The Blog for Readers of the International Herald Tribune, which comments on a Nov. 18, 2008, NYT story by Richard Perez-Pena on San Diego's nonprofit Voice of San Diego news site: http://preview.tinyurl.com/ppdn8e

This post showed up on Twitter today, via the in_media feed, and even though it references a months-old NYT story it's still relevant, because the attitudes illustrated are still central to daily journalism's failure to adapt to new challenges.

As THINK! points out, the Times piece is more than a bit clueless, even though it professionally covers many of the relevant bases in the first ten or 12 paragraphs, putting the Voice of San Diego in the context of failing daily newspapers and the need for new models, possibly including nonprofit news organizations. Then comes the lame part -- and, I assume, the reason THINK! rips the Times in its headline: "NYT's media correspondent tells us all we need to know about what's wrong with newspapers," and adds: "I think this speaks for itself. I mean, really, this is like GM backing SUV's and being surprised when Toyota and Renault do better."

VoiceofSanDiego's site looks much like any newspaper's, frequently updated with breaking news and organized around broad topics: government and politics, housing, economics, the environment, schools and science. It has few graphics, but plenty of photography and, through a partnership with a local TV station, some video.
But it is thin - strictly local, selective in coverage and without the wire service articles that plump up most sites.

That's exactly why daily papers are getting it wrong so often -- assuming that the new guys should basically do it their way, down to and including the use of the "wire service articles that plump up most sites" -- and make them boring and indistinguishable from each other. Yikes! Being local, selective in coverage and sans lame and commoditized wire copy is WHY sites like Voice of San Diego have a voice, and an audience.

And on a budget of less than $800,000 last year, according to the Times article, or about what the Times probably spends on catered lunches for visiting dignitaries. Times' columnist Thomas Friedman could pick up $800K singlehandedly in a matter of months, giving canned speeches to business audiences.

But sites like Voice of San Diego, and the Bay Area's Redwood Age -- http://redwoodage.com/ -- are the future, or at least an intimation of it. While even great, or once great, papers like the NYT are the past, or at least are living there in their current incarnations.

As a longtime reporter in the business journals realm, I've seen the same sort of dynmaic play out for years. Daily papers, like the San Francisco Chronicle here in the Bay Area, could have squished my paper like a bug at any time over the course of many years by simply doing a better job of covering local business news. But they never tried that approach. Just as many daily papers can't imagine trying the experiments organizations like Voice of San Diego or Redwood Age are attempting, even as those daily papers shrivel up, shrink and in many instances die.

Why? The people who own, manage and staff them can't imagine doing things differently. Simple things, like focusing on local news. being selective, and avoiding commodity wire stories.

One thing is perfectly clear

The one clear thing in the chaos over journalism's future and definition: Thanks to the Internet, it's going to have to become much faster, more flexible and more interactive. And pronto.

Anyone who uses Twitter regularly for news and information, as opposed to mindless Twitterpation, can see that evolving on a daily basis. Yes, mistakes and hoaxes get made and passed on. But that's long been true in traditional journalism too. What makes all this new and different is that the gap between 'readers' and 'writers' is vanishing. Readers can comment instantly on what you write, challenging your thinking or your facts. Yes, it can be annoying, or in some cases verge on cyberstalking or character assasination. But it can also be enlightening.

Mistakes can be fixed almost instantly. Ideas can change. Progress can be made in real time, or very close to it.

Old-line journalists, especially editors (I think) are resistant to this new world. They liked the old one, where a few letters to the editor or public service announcements did the trick of interacting with the public. But now the public wants more interaction, and wants to help bake the journalistic cake, either by providing news and info, or by commenting, sometimes pretty caustically, on what others are reporting and writing.

Is that so bad? In blogs and many online forums, of course, much of this is old hat. But it's hitting mainstream journalism, and hard. How the mainstream media respond will determine who lives and who dies.

I'm old enough to be part of the old, and experimental enough to be part of the new. I think it's exciting, despite the 'creative destruction' currently wrecking much of the old journalistic infrastructure. It turns out that a format laid out for journalism in the 19th century needs major tweaking as the first decade of the 21st century heads downhill.

That's not so much of a surprise, is it?