A New Wrinkle in the Newspaper-Blogs Continuum
We have blogs. We have newspapers. We have newspapers with blogs and blogs that act like newspapers. If it wasn't becoming hard enough to draw distinctions between old and new media on the internet, consider an entity such as this: today, Joel Kramer, former editor and publisher at the Star Tribune in the Twin Cities, announced a new venture that falls somewhere between the usual media-endpoints of newspapers and blogs. It's called MinnPost, and it is a site intended to serve as an "internet-based daily."
Kramer isn't the only former print-media staffer in the venture. He has pulled together contributors from across the region who have served the Star Tribune, the Pioneer Press, City Pages, and Minnesota Public Radio. He has also pulled together a total of over a million dollars in startup funds from local sources and from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.
With this kind of support, it begs the question: how does an internet daily, run and staffed by former newspaper editors and reporters, fit in the usual continuum bounded by traditional newspapers at one extreme and self-published bloggers at the other?
First, a quick primer for those new to the ongoing saga of the Star Tribune. In May, the paper announced it would be cutting almost 150 jobs, including about 50 from the newsroom. It offered some columnists the choice to become reporters, and offered many others buyouts. Film, arts, architecture, and fashion writing was cut or eliminated. And it all came after two dozen writers, editors, and support staff took buyout offers when the paper was sold to Avista Capital Partners in March.
The release of scores of professional and pedigreed journalists into the local jobs market led some other outlets to catch what they could. But weeklies and web portals can only absorb so much, and so the remaining editors and reporters were apparently left with an alternative: banding together with Kramer to start their own source.
Kramer has indicated that he sees his online startup as not-quite-a-blog, having told MPR, "Some of the blogs are interesting, there's a lot of it that's not," he said. "A lot of it is just pontificating, and I'm more interested in informed commentary as well as hard-hitting news gathering." Now, as readers of, say, TPM, know, original reporting and informed commentary isn't something new to the blogosphere, whereas readers of, say any of the multiple New York Times-hosted blogs know that the old media can accelerate to the speed of the blogospheric news cycle, too.
Without necessarily favoring one way of publishing online news over another, I want to point out that there is more here than the usual dichotomy when it comes to online news sources. As newspapers continue to recalibrate in the new media environment, we may see more sites just as this, that offer something in between, whether offered by the newspapers themselves or exiles from the same.
As a final thought, I offer this bit of analysis from John Stoehr at artsJournal's Flyover blog. Stoehr takes the news of MinnPress' launch as a sign of what Mitchell Stevens called "analytic journalism" in the Columbia Journalism Review. Stevens' words:
The extra value our quality news organizations can and must regularly add is analysis: thoughtful, incisive attempts to divine the significance of events -- insights, not just information. What is required -- if journalism is to move beyond selling cheap, widely available, staler-than-your-muffin news -- is, to choose a not very journalistic-sounding word, wisdom.
Here's more historical precedent: In the days when dailies monopolized breaking news, slower journals -- weeklies like The Nation, The New Republic, Time -- stepped back from breaking news and sold smart analysis. Now it is the dailies, and even the evening news shows, that are slow. Now it is time for them to take that step back.
As Stoer seems to think, new sites like MinnPress can take this step, if the traditional news sources won't. Are such new sites the weekly journals of the new media era?
It fits in with any number of professional blogs out there, like the Nick Denton stuff or Allyinsider.com or like the sprawling TPM empire.
I guess the differences are -- is TPM a blog or is like a more interactive Slate or Salon? Is it a web magazine? Or a blog? Or an online newsaper? Is it a Wiki in that we readers choose and create at least some of the content? Does it matter?
I don't know. I don't even know that it matters, either. I think I'm going to lump everything on the web under the rubrik "web based publication" and leave it at that. So long as they're all afforded the legal protections we give to "the press" I have no problems with what people call them.
thosethingswesay.blogspot.com
August 27, 2007 12:59 PM | Reply | Permalink
The dividing line has to do with original reporting. If you are doing original reporting than you are in the information creating business. If you are commenting on existing information then you are in the opinion making business.
The format used to deliver the information will become less of a discriminatory function as time goes on. I would guess that if a viable electronic book existed now many people would read their newspapers using the device. The Sony device is a lame start and PC's aren't exactly suitable while standing on the subway.
This is what makes TPM such a unique site, it is one of the few to have real reporters and do original investigative journalism. If others follow it can only be a good thing. Imagine what it will do for global warming if we stop cutting down forests to make paper that will be discarded almost immediately.
--- Policies not Politics
Daily Landscape
August 27, 2007 4:04 PM | Reply | Permalink
Without necessarily favoring one way of publishing online news over another, I want to point out that there is more here than the usual dichotomy when it comes to online news sources. As newspapers continue to recalibrate in the new media environment...
I'd have to agree with destor. It's pretty clear at some point, we're going to have to get over this word "blog."
The "way of publishing" news is becoming, rather quickly in the Big Scheme of things, fairly irrelevant. Wikipedia has become a source for breaking news, and the muckrakers over at TPMM are actually breaking serious news.
The real difference here is the economics of it all. (And Josh mentioned this in his interview in the Bill Moyers doc recently on PBS...) For organizations that can afford to serve people who still want the dead tree version of the news, they can publish it. But the web has opened up journalism, in this case, to a bunch of ex-newspaper people -- 5 years or so ago, Kramer and Co. couldn't have done what they're doing today. They'd be out of a job, maybe moving to a different market, or something else. Who knows if they can make a living at it, but it's significant they can even enter the market at all.
The point about the continuum of news-serving organizations is right on target. In a way, this move gives credibility to the journalism at TPMetc. I suspect we'll continue to see moves like this, and they'll continue to make clear the distinctions between journalists that happen to write on a blog, and bigmouths like me, who only offer an opinion on the news other people actually report.
As an aside, while I can understand why journalists feel threatened by the web and by blogs, really, it's the most exciting development in their industry in probably decades. I wish more of them would embrace it, like the folks at MinnPost have done.
Don't fear us, journalists. We're very sweet, sweet people.
"Thank God George Bush is our president." -Rudy Giuliani
August 27, 2007 4:15 PM | Reply | Permalink
I'm not sure what journalists are fearing, exactly. I'm a journalist but I'm a young one and the journalists I know who are around my age all understand that we need to embrace every medium. To declare yourself only print or only web is a bad career move, I think. Those that will succeed will be able to work in all the mediums. A good story is a good story. Even the old canard about magazines being better for in depth long-form pieces isn't necessarily true. I frequently get emails from people who've read my longer print work on line and I frequently read long pieces on line (or I print them and take them to the gym).
Josh is a journalist. His employees are all journalists. Is there a difference between what I might muse about here or on my blog and what I write about for the magazine I work for? Sure. But one feeds the other. I notice I'm more productive at work when I'm active here. Minds in motion tend to stay in motion. Minds at rest watch Youtube.
I'll tell you this -- I know what I like to read. I spend very little time worrying about whether somebody is a journalist or not. A lot of people will say that in journalism we have procures and editors and all that. True enough. But it all comes down to whether or not you're honestly telling a story or making an argument. If you're being honest then it doesn't matter what form you're writing in or who you're writing for. There might be issues of quality, but you'll find those everywhere.
I guess the only complaint some journalists have is that people who used to have to write letters to the editor and thus pass a gatekeeper in order to express themselves, can now post there thoughts on their own.
Funny, but I don't think there's ever been a time in journalism where people complained that non-professionals were allowed to vent their spleens on the op-ed pages just by writing letters.
Anyway, something like TPM is the future. It's professional but there's lots of room for commenters, reader submissions and reader editing. As you say, cscs, nothing for more mainstream journalists to fear -- unless, that is we're not doing our jobs.
thosethingswesay.blogspot.com
August 27, 2007 5:36 PM | Reply | Permalink
It is about economics (cscs's point) it has nothing to do with bloggers versus journalist, or journalist up all night in wide-eyed fear of a world dominated by snarky, adsense-rich bloggers who write about how pathetic and lousy they are.
An unhappy, unemployed, or otherwise discontented journalist who has toughed it out in local reporting is a force of nature. If that person wants to remain in journalism, he or she will. They will create ventures, stripped of legacy, that combine razor sharp fact gathering and reporting with content approaches that allow for plenty of community interaction. The best will thrive.
What I don't know is if the ad market is really tuned for local online publishing ventures.
Take a look at local blogs, those that focus on the community, issues, etc. They make no money (sure, there's your standard list of exceptions but they are rare.) But even here in DC, my home, which has an active blog community, local advertisers have no way of really reaching it except through the big ad networks. No one is quitting their day job.
Yes, the world has changed for the big national blogs such as this one. But local blogging is still in its primal soup stage. And that may be a sign that the audience for local online content is lagging.
August 27, 2007 8:27 PM | Reply | Permalink
I would love to have access to a true news source. Devoid of political and social biases and the types of carping, bitching, bad language, name calling, entertainment, and failed attempts to be news comedians that make up almost all of the so called news these days. (I don't even consider Fox et al. to be “news” sources any more, their content is so very predictable.
I enjoy sites such as this with their commentaries and comments, they are often factually informative and so, often, are readers comments, but they are not sufficient sources of unbiased news.
August 28, 2007 3:42 AM | Reply | Permalink
Blogging and Democracy: Redux
.
There is a marvelous passage within a 7/30 New Yorker magazine article regarding the rampant increase in (citizen) journalism .......that resonates with much of recent blog/blogging discussions.
--"A new means was at hand: journalism. In 1836, Chu writes, Paris's daily newspaper circulation was eighty thousand. By 1870, it topped a million. Publications large and small engendered what the great conservative critic Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve called "industrial literature," churned out with "audacity and naïveté" by men "with this single device inscribed on their banner, 'to live by writing.' " Sainte-Beuve saw the development as an inevitable consequence of democracy. He noted, unhappily, that it was in line "with our electoral and industrial customs that everyone may have his page.""--
I found it interesting. Oui? No?
The Title of the piece is "Painting by Numbers, Gustave Courbet and the making of a master, by Peter Schjeldahl" pg 2.
August 28, 2007 6:48 AM | Reply | Permalink
Oui. Good catch.
I love that that the “audacity and naïveté” allegation is still operative.August 28, 2007 7:38 PM | Reply | Permalink
Oh yes ... You have no idea how I get looked upon for saying thanks but no thanks to all the YouTube's my wide network of wonderful friends send. For my taste at least, stimulating they are not.
~OGD~
August 29, 2007 3:16 AM | Reply | Permalink
Mention of the "Military-Industrial Complex" as reason for the Iraq War and the atrocities being done for its survival seems tough for the MSM to digest. Thus I am putting this item in the blogs for all to see:
Whistleblowers on Fraud in Iraq Facing Penalties
http://www.forbes.com/feeds/ap/2007/08/24/ap4052736.html
Sorry if it not directly pertinent to this item. But you have got to read it!
August 29, 2007 10:02 AM | Reply | Permalink