Digital devices divide -- and connect -- Vermont communities. Front Porch Forum. Taking ‘Broccoli Journalism’ Hyperlocal. Mediameister Jeff Jarvis is the pluperfect phrasemaker. “There’s no why there,” he memorably summed up the Mark Zuckerberg-Facebook biopic The Social Network. But I wish his jibe about “broccoli journalism” didn’t prove so hardy. Jarvis coined the phrase in 2009 – in an attack on a report calling for federal subsidies to prop up the cost of reporting “serious” news stories. Google has compiled 798,000 search results for Jarvis’ journalistic put-down – most recently in the new FCC study “The Information Needs of Communities”: “As editors prune beats to leave only those that generate buzz — or, in the case of Web sites, traffic — they are tempted to serve fewer portions of ‘broccoli journalism,’ i.e. stories that might be both unpopular but good for you.”
If your quest for information online is weightier than simply where to find the best pizza in NYC or a great mani/pedi for $35 in Washington, why should that make you a Debbie Downer-like consumer of news? Chicago News Cooperative - Reporting and Analysis About What Matters in Chicago. Manage My Account - Posterous - The place to post everything. Just email us. Post and share from anywhere.. Gannett layoffs accelerated demise of InJersey hyperlocal news sites. When Ted Mann started Gannett’s InJersey hyperlocal news sites two years ago, he wanted them to become a nexus of community conversation. He envisioned that about half of the sites’ content would come from Gannett staffers and half would come from local community members.
That didn’t happen, though; there were not enough community contributions or enough Gannett staffers to keep the sites going. Just a week after Gannett’s latest round of layoffs, Mann announced on Wednesday that he had decided to close the sites. “The layoffs were the straw that broke the camel’s back … and they accelerated the decision to do this,” said Mann, digital development director at Gannett New Jersey and founder of InJersey.com.
“Sooner or later we were going to have to do this unless all of a sudden I had a great deal of funding and I could really staff up on these sites and rethink the platform.” The site’s demise demonstrates the challenges of sustaining a hyperlocal news site. Losing staff to layoffs. Everyblock hires new president. June 21, 2011|By Wailin Wong | Tribune staff reporter EveryBlock, the Chicago-based website that collects community news and connects neighbors with each other, has hired a new president to oversee its growth and marketing efforts. The company, which was founded in 2007 by Naperville native Adrian Holovaty and acquired by MSNBC.com in 2009, said it hired Brian Addison for the newly created position of president.
Holovaty remains with EveryBlock, which will have seven employees with Addison's addition. "I'm going to be in charge of the product side of things, which is frankly what I care about the most," Holovaty said. He added: "I'm a coder at heart, so it's a really nice change for me. " Addison was most recently general manager of Band Digital, a Chicago-based digital advertising firm. EveryBlock collects data such as building permits, crime reports, news stories and even Yelp reviews for 16 cities. Addison said EveryBlock's new focus was a factor in drawing him to the company. Local News Ratings | Neiman Lab Report Local News | Philip Bump. Most cities don’t have politicians who send pictures of their genitalia to porn stars. Very few do; at last count, the number totaled one. Most cities don’t have a President who gets into debates on policy with foreign leaders; they don’t have internationally recognized music stars; they don’t create fascinating innovative tech companies.
Most cities potter along, debating the police department budget or the addition to the zoo or an increase in auto thefts. Most cities, in other words, are boring. Once upon a time, there were two main ways that people learned about what was happening in the world: newspapers and the six o’clock news. Now, of course, people can get any information they want on anything at any time. Which is why it’s unsurprising that a comScore report commissioned by the FCC found a “surprisingly small audience for local news traffic.”
Grim. No system for engaging a local audience has been proven to work, but many have been tried. I think I know why. St. Louis Beacon: Revenue Beyond the Banner Ad. The St. Louis Beacon was founded in 2007 by a group of veteran St. Louis Post-Dispatch reporters who perceived a serious lack of in-depth reporting about the communities they lived in. After building up the site, they snagged a couple of grants and partnerships that made the project viable. But, like many local news sites started by high-minded journalists, the Beacon was initially only about the journalism. “They didn’t have anybody on staff who was thinking about business models or technology strategy, or any of that sort of stuff,” says Nicole Hollway, the site’s general manager, who came on board in 2008.
Street Fight spoke with Hollway recently about the Beacon’s evolving business model, which relies less on traditional ad sales and more on creative sponsorships, events, and promotions. How did you first approach the project of creating a business model for the Beacon? One of the unique and important things about The Beacon is we realized that the Web site was not what we were. Future of Media Report - A Feminist Challenge. This is a guest post from Carolyn Byerly, cross posted from WIMN's Voices, the blog of Women In News and Media. Finding women and people of color in the long-awaited Federal Communications Commission report The Information Needs of Communities: The Changing Media Landscape in a Broadband Age is an exercise in near futility.
The 478-page report integrates details on the status of various media platforms and assesses mediated informational needs by communities within the United States in the years to come, ending with a short chapter on recommendations. Yet those of us know through experience that when women and people of color are omitted or barely mentioned in such a comprehensive undertaking, their interests are most certainly not going to be part of any structural changes.
If Congress and the FCC follow this report, the future of media promises to be as white and male as the present. Who are the people considered central to the report? We deserve better than this. Seattle: A New Media Case Study. By Michael R. Fancher Seattle, perhaps more than any other American city, epitomizes the promise and challenges of American journalism at the local level. In the last few years, it has experienced both a sharp loss of traditional news resources and an exciting rise in new journalistic enterprises and inventive collaborations between traditional and emerging media (see Appendix for more about these sites). A New America Foundation case study of Seattle’s news ecosystem describes it as “a digital community still in transition.” A new, vibrant media scene is emerging. But it also may not take hold. Consider first the contraction. The loss was much greater when the Post-Intelligencer stopped printing in March 2009.
But the closures of the King County Journal and Post-Intelligencer were only half the story of lost newsroom jobs in Seattle. Hit hard by declining print advertising, all three Seattle-area daily newspapers had lost money throughout the previous decade. Seattle’s digital vitality. Online Comments: Dialogue or Diatribe? It might be hard to believe, but one reason NPR was inspired to build its social media community is what it found in personal ads like this one—"Female golfer, loves NPR, travel and skydiving, is looking for like-minded man. " With NPR squeezed into the middle of self-portraits, the network figured that if it created a digital public square, people would want to congregate there.
So three years ago NPR invited its 27 million listeners to gather at this virtual water cooler to share ideas, suggest stories, offer comments and criticisms, and participate in civil dialogue. Joining NPR's digital community requires creating an account. Individuals need to log in each time they comment on a story, though using real names is not required. Since the launch in 2008, those tasked with oversight of this digital community's dynamics at times have felt as though they are riding a bucking bronco in the rodeo ring. So the hunt is continually on for workable—and affordable—solutions. Want to see more? Who clicks more on local news, New York or Omaha? Surprising data from the FCC on local online news. While one can argue with some of the interpretations, Matthew Hindman’s new study on how local online news is consumed gives us interesting data on reader behavior.
And beyond the headline — people don’t consume a lot of local online news — there’s also an interesting data set that goes beyond national generalizations to individual markets. Below, I’ve broken out three slices of that data set that get at the same question: How does local online news consumption differ from community to community? Hindman’s analysis looked at 100 metro areas in the United States and examined sampled data from comScore on how web users in those metro areas use the Internet. He then tried to identify all noteworthy local news sites in those cities. (You can read the full paper for his methodology, but he was looking in part for any local news site that was viewed at least once by at least 1 percent of the comScore sample in a particular month.) There’s a wide spectrum of results from the top 100 markets.
Emerging Economics of Community News. By Michele McLellan It is easy to oversimplify what is happening in online news. Breathless headlines — from the $315 million sale of The Huffington Post to AOL, Patch’s march to 1,000 plus local sites, to the early dismantling of TBD.com in Washington, D.C. – tend to obscure other important efforts, especially on the local front. Commitment and a sense of community far outdistance celebrity or cash in the emerging news ecosystem.
But increased learning about what doesn’t work and sophistication about what might work offers a promise that more local news sites will stay alive and grow. To be sure, many local news startups have failed. That has led to fears that there is no business model for local news online. I see growing evidence, however, that those fears may be proved false. Instead, my work studying the emerging landscape and my ongoing survey of new sites suggests two other trends. Not everyone is there. Define target audiences. This is not big money. The St.