The Future of the Newspaper
http://www.orient-lodge.com/node/3312
It is fairly long and explores several angles. I would love to hear
thoughts from people on this list.
Aldon
-----Original Message-----Aldon
From: dco...@gmail.com [mailto:dco...@gmail.com]On Behalf Of David Cohn
Sent: Wednesday, November 19, 2008 7:37 PM
To: Aldon Hynes
Cc: jtm...@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: {JTM} The Future of the Newspaper
It is an excellent post - and I agree with your premise: "journalism will survive the death of its institutions."
It is very important that we don't conflate journalism with newspapers and assume that if one goes, the other will disappear.
That said: not all the tools are there that need to be in order to do in-depth reporting.
I strongly believe that it is up to the citizens of a city to ensure that journalism continues by either donating time or money. Both are helpful.
Take Spot.Us: We have one pitch which is just $135 shy of being fully funded! It's a good story too - on the rise of tent cities during this economic crisis.
http://spot.us/pitches/12
All we need is 13 or so citizens to stand up and make a difference by donating $10. I have to believe those people are there - which means that instead of paying for the large overhead of a newspaper - all the money will towards the reporting (the important part). Currently most newspaper budgets only give 10-25% of their budget towards actual reporting.
But it takes courage and so far I'm finding it very difficult to get people to donate towards journalism (both time and money). The tools need to be there to lower the threshold so that the amount of journalism that newspapers produce is matched by participatory journalism (either bloggers or people giving small donations).
On Wed, Nov 19, 2008 at 7:22 PM, Aldon Hynes <Aldon...@orient-lodge.com> wrote:
Here in Connecticut, we are facing the possiblity of a couple newspapers
being closed down, which is generating some interesting discussions. I've
written my reactions to the discussions in a blog post
The Future of the Newspaper
http://www.orient-lodge.com/node/3312
It is fairly long and explores several angles. I would love to hear
thoughts from people on this list.
Aldon
clear=all>
Both of you are fabulous MGP/JTM collaborators -- let's figure out a way
to support an experiment in Bristol and New Britain if the papers go down.
I posted:
http://www.newenglandnews.org/?q=node/308
Perhaps the New England News Forum can help somehow. Could we rally
j-schools around New England to incubate local online news communities in
Bristol and New Britain? MGP/JTM has such a community now developing that
could provide expert advice -- Tracy in Seattle, the team at BaristaNet,
Paul Bass and Christine in Connecticut, and on and on . . . and now
Spot.us is one element of a support system. For the RepJ experiment in
Northfield, Minn., we hope to incorporate Spot.us support for some story
projects: http://pjnet.org/representativejournalism/
-- bill densmore
My blog post yesterday generated some good discussion so I've written a
followup, which mentions the idea of NENF potentially rallying j-schools
around New England to incubate online news communities in Bristol and New
Britain, as well as talking about the potential to use Spot.Us as a means of
raising funds. I look forward to further discussions.
Aldon
The Future of the Newspaper, Part 2
http://www.orient-lodge.com/node/3313