COMM 207, 297, 317, 393: Is 'hyperlocal' the future of the news business? 'Time for the kids to take over'

Could be. Howard Kurtz' media column today in The Washington Post cites a report that says "hyper-local startups" may be taking up some of the slack left as general-interest, a-little-bit-of-something-for-everybody newspapers downsize or go out of business altogether. Here's the money graf(s):

Despite the "immediate disaster" striking newspapers, says Michael Schudson, a professor at Columbia's Graduate School of Journalism, he was struck by "the really stunning enthusiasm and excitement of people engaged in many of these startups, who were just bubbling over with what they were doing." Schudson wrote the report with Leonard Downie Jr., The Washington Post's former executive editor who is now a professor at Arizona State University.

Their recommendations -- particularly for a federally financed fund to subsidize local reporting -- might not fly. But amid all the hand-wringing over newspaper deaths and bankruptcies, "The Reconstruction of American Journalism" makes clear that a thousand media flowers are, if not blooming, at least popping up.

These new ventures "are actually re-creating the kind of competition that used to exist in local news reporting a long time ago," says Downie, now a Post Co. vice president at large. He's not worried about their quality because "most of them have been started by seasoned professionals who used to work for newspapers. My greater concern is the fragility of their economic base."

And so on. Must reading, I'd say, for journalism students. So I'll let you read Kurtz' blog for details on exactly how the startups work and exactly where the jobs might be (besides, that part of it's speculative anyway). Kurtz concludes, and I agree:

These journalistic sprouts may never grow into towering institutions, and it's hard to imagine that the coverage of city hall, Capitol Hill and Kabul won't suffer. But they may produce a more diverse and energized form of reporting than the top-down monopolies of the past. They may be better suited to cover neighborhoods, recruit amateurs, engage in real dialogue and have some fun in the process.


"The days of a kind of news media paternalism . . . are largely gone," the report says. If that's true, not everyone will mourn the old way of doing things. Time for the kids to take over.

Amen.

COMM 317, take note. Kurtz, by the way, has a useful take on the "Hot Air Journalism" displayed in coverage of the balloon hoax in Fort Collins, Colo. It makes a good segue to something I want to take up in COMM 317 (media ethics) today:

I don't blame television for carrying the two-hour balloon extravaganza that turned out to be an utter sham. The anchors should have been more cautious in asserting there was a boy inside, but the authorities were taking it seriously. Plus, television isn't all that hard to fool. Remember the runaway bride, who claimed she'd been kidnapped? In 24-hour cable, you put the live pictures on the air first and seek explanations later. Any producer who cut away from the balloon, saying his news team wanted to gather more information first, would have been fired on the spot.

It's after we discovered that the kid never left the home that we saw the usual media excess. The yakkers, the experts, the child psychologists, all carrying on about people they've never met. Yes, Richard Heene seemed like a truly strange figure on "Wife Swap," and now seems to have been angling for a reality-show encore. But you begin to suspect that journalists are secretly pleased by this latest turn of events, by the way the story morphed from life-and-death drama to sick soap opera.

I'm not sure about that. I'm a journalist, and I'm not pleased. But I don't have to worry about ratings. And Kurtz' story does make a good segue to something I want to take up ... which is, conveniently enough, in the blog post below.