David Simon, who created the greatest TV show ever ohmigod it's like Dickens etc., testified before the Senate Commerce Committee about the future of newspapers yesterday and told members that if newspapers die no one will be left to cover City Hall. Gawker's Ryan Tate offered an excellent response.
Just use the Blogger's Cliff Notes for City Hall/Town Hall meetings. There's a chapter devoted to staying awake.
I really, really wish the death of the newspaper industry hadn't become this "us vs. them" thing between newspapers and blogs.
It's put bloggers in the bizarre position of cheerleading the death of the newspaper industry.
This is not a zero-sum game. When newspapers die, bloggers don't "win."
I HEAR WILL LEITCH DOES.
Two things about Ryan's response.
1. I wish he had included more concrete examples of bloggers who make it work who weren't from the Bay Area or New York City. That's the sort of stuff that gets me jumping up and down and saying things like "indie rock is not the world." There's a lot of country out there that isn't populated by
2. As an employee of Denton, he has to know that "unsexy" stuff like City Hall meetings--and, heck, taking time to actually go to those meetings and report on them, as opposed to just critiquing others' coverage of them--doesn't get traffic and thus isn't monetlizable. Honestly, what I feel has damaged journalism the most during the online age is the issue of metrics; now that overlords can see what people aren't reading, they can allocate/slash resources accordingly. Or is Arianna Huffington's leadership role in this "new journalism" a sign that people are supposed to work for free and subsidize their journalistic efforts with being famous?
...by people who have the time, resources, etc. to engage in these sorts of pursuits.
(I like to leave people hanging)
also, "monetlizable"? jeez i need to go back to bed. apologies.
No. Stay up and keep going. Your points are valid and an important part of this equation.
It's never as simple as anyone on either side of this argument want to have it.
Oh, I just get embarrassed about my typos. (You know how it is.) But the events of the past 18 months (whether they affected me directly or were far-off) have obviously made me think about the drawbacks of only getting information from online sources -- you know, all that Republic.com stuff about cocooning, combined with the pageviews-at-any-cost ideologies that have resulted in those awful gallery/listicle hybrids clogging up the bandwidth of sites that once valued things like coherent paragraphs. I'm not covering a topic that's, y'know, life or death in my day job -- but it is at least entertaining on some level. And people just don't want to read about stuff that they aren't already familiar with (fun fact: our music-recommendation posts consistently traffic worse than anything else). So I wonder just how covering "boring" things like a City Council meeting where not much is going on at a surface level -- or, heck, where not much is going on that doesn't play into the self-interest of the bloggers covering it -- will be sustainable in a world where (imperfect!) traffic measurements are paramount.
At the zoning meetings I attended as a local government reporter in Virginia, the only bloggers present were angry neighbor types with a particular axe to grind â€" property taxes, parking ordnances, you name it. They were few in number and usually compromised by personal vested interest in the issues.
I don’t doubt that Ryan encountered bloggers who were good investigative journalists in their own right, but shouldn’t we just call them freelancers? I think there’s an important distinction between people who comment on reported items for fun and sometimes money, and those who go out and provide raw material. I enjoy the fruits of the first group (hey, I’m here), but I also applaud the second group. And I subscribe to the Washington Post. The print edition! Whoa.
Great conversation going on here. To further Maura's point: Will there be a City Hall blogger in, say, Peoria? The elderly, also, are not big online types. They tend get their info for a quarter or so in the paper. What about the Luddites?
Maybe hyper-local news broadcasts -- and talk radio for the elderly -- can fill in the gaps by using these "City Hall Bloggers" as talking heads, plugging their web sites, increasing unique viewers, making the effort (quite possibly?) monetizable.