Comment Re:Newspapers: A necessary waste? (Score 1) 132
As a newspaper (well, alt-weekly) editor, I've got to respond to this.
You could have written your comment from my town. I work in the same offices as the local daily, and got my start as a beat reporter for them.
In my mind, the problem comes down to profit margin. Sure, Craigslist is eating up classified ad revenue. I've been in those meetings, too. There's not as much money coming in.
So what's the initial solution? Cutting positions in the editorial department (that's the folks what does the writin').
The problem I see locally is that it means we don't have as much local news coverage. My daily went from five reporters to cover the community down to two, primarily through attrition. Heck, I covered local education (K-12, plus a university and technical college), and wasn't replaced when I moved over to the alt-weekly gig.
A lot of people in my company are pushing user-generated content. In our case, that's meant repurposing posts from our Web site's blog to a weekly "community voice" publication, much like the site you describe.
So what happens? We get a community publication that's old news to anyone who checks out our Web site, and doesn't contain any "real" reporting. We end up with a daily that's a conglomeration of a few local stories, but mostly wire copy from the Associated Press that anyone can see for free up on CNN.com or a million other sites the day before. And people stop reading.
"Revenue generation" is a big word in the news industry, and the editorial folks aren't seen as direct revenue generators.
Granted, I'm still a low man on the totem pole, but my solution would be to plow money into getting good reporters and writers. Think about it - for the national stuff, anyone's going to check out the big Web sites or their TV news.
But for local things -- what happened at the school board meeting, new businesses opening downtown, who's up-and-coming in the city's political scene -- they'd only have one definitive source. That'd take more reporters, but I think that eventually it'd drive up our readership, thus boosting ad revenue, making everyone happy.
You could have written your comment from my town. I work in the same offices as the local daily, and got my start as a beat reporter for them.
In my mind, the problem comes down to profit margin. Sure, Craigslist is eating up classified ad revenue. I've been in those meetings, too. There's not as much money coming in.
So what's the initial solution? Cutting positions in the editorial department (that's the folks what does the writin').
The problem I see locally is that it means we don't have as much local news coverage. My daily went from five reporters to cover the community down to two, primarily through attrition. Heck, I covered local education (K-12, plus a university and technical college), and wasn't replaced when I moved over to the alt-weekly gig.
A lot of people in my company are pushing user-generated content. In our case, that's meant repurposing posts from our Web site's blog to a weekly "community voice" publication, much like the site you describe.
So what happens? We get a community publication that's old news to anyone who checks out our Web site, and doesn't contain any "real" reporting. We end up with a daily that's a conglomeration of a few local stories, but mostly wire copy from the Associated Press that anyone can see for free up on CNN.com or a million other sites the day before. And people stop reading.
"Revenue generation" is a big word in the news industry, and the editorial folks aren't seen as direct revenue generators.
Granted, I'm still a low man on the totem pole, but my solution would be to plow money into getting good reporters and writers. Think about it - for the national stuff, anyone's going to check out the big Web sites or their TV news.
But for local things -- what happened at the school board meeting, new businesses opening downtown, who's up-and-coming in the city's political scene -- they'd only have one definitive source. That'd take more reporters, but I think that eventually it'd drive up our readership, thus boosting ad revenue, making everyone happy.
