There's destruction, yes; also creation

The stories of destruction in the news-media revolution come every day now, and it's a safe bet the pace will quicken. It will be hard to watch, and also hard to quit watching. But the creative side of this "creative destruction" story is well under way.

I've been watching the springing up of small, community news sites -- usually 1 or 2-person operations -- and thought I'd pass along a couple of data points. Both refer to for-profit community sites that are 6-8 months old, and run purely on advertising:

-- The husband/wife team that runs Ann Arbor Chronicle already is making enough revenue to pay household bills, including health insurance.

-- Bob Gough, who single-handedly runs Quincy News, takes home a salary of $1,000 a week. This in an Illinois town of 40,000 with a daily newspaper and 2 local TV stations as competitors.

Both of these operations -- and other for-profits I wrote about at OJR yesterday -- are hanging tough in the current recession, and even expect to expand during it. Ultimately, no one knows if they, or other new models, will make it. But I think they're good examples of opportunities that are opening up and will open up, not just city-wide operations but also neighborhood sites and topic-centered sites. Note the new community projects the NYT is launching.

It's hardly unrealistic for an Annenberg student to think that he or she could leave USC and be the instant creator of one of these sites -- with bucket loads of growth potential.

Update: Jane Stevens, a visiting fellow at the University of Missouri School of Journalism, also wrote this week about the new community sites being rapidly created. She cited some of my OJR blog but also gave a rich report on the large number of neighborhood sites in Seattle. Here's her post.

How are community news sites faring?

I'm working on a blog for OJR that tries to assess the financial health of some of the community news startups. So far, I'm finding some encouraging responses -- though it's early.

One of them is from a respected new-media pioneer, Jonathan Weber, who runs the New West Web site. It's an interesting hybrid in that it tries to cover issues that are of special interest to the West -- environmental, developmental, political, etc. But in classic entrepreneurial fashion, New West also makes money by hosting conferences on these issues and by a small indoor advertising business on the side.

What struck me in Weber's e-mail response to me is that he sees some encouraging signs in retail merchants' acceptance of Internet advertising. In what may be the ultimate "silver lining" sighting, he also said even the recession may be helping. "This kind of dislocation forces people to revisit how they are spending money, and rethink their marketing strategies overall, and that is actually very good for us," he told me in an e-mail.

I'm still gathering string for this and hope to post on OJR by Thursday.

What will happen in SF? Something big

Hearst announced today that the The San Francisco Chronicle might go up for sale if it doesn't get huge and quick concessions from its unions. It even raised the possibility that it might shut down. In some ways we've been waiting for this for years. I think it was at least two years ago, maybe three, that I heard the Chronicle was losing $1 million a week. Ken Doctor estimates here that owner Hearst may have blown through $250 million in losses since buying the Chronicle in 2000.

The Chronicle has had what feel like intractable problems for a long time. Principally, it has a relatively small geographic and population base that's ringed by competitors. Compounding the problem, it's struggled with very high labor costs and other overhead.

What will happen? Nobody knows -- except that it's likely to be big.

Ideas for upcoming speakers?

After this week's class, we'll begin a four-week period in which we talk about the changes under way in the worlds of beat reporting, political satire, ethnic press and international reporting. We have a speaker for our international reporting session. It's Marjorie Miller, former foreign editor for the LA Times and now a member of the Opinion page.

If you have someone from the LA area you'd like to hear from on the other topics, give us a holler.

Sizing up newspapers' watchdog reporting

I posted a blog last week at the Center on Communication Leadership and Policy that got a fair amount of notice -- mainly courtesy of Mr. Romenesko. He gave it the headline: Newspaper investigative reporting can be easily replaced? Don't believe it! I'd just finished judging McClatchy's in-house newspaper contest, and was struck by how deep and wide is the watchdog reporting that continues in newspapers. Which in turn prompted me to write that a very big void would be created if newspapers couldn't do this anymore.

I'm not a newspaper supremacist. I think there's a very decent chance that watchdog reporting will have a new and, quite possibly, richer life on the Web. But I also think new-media experts are underestimating how much watchdog reporting exists now in newspapers. It's not just I-team, five-part investigation stuff. And it's not just happening at the New York Times.

Paying for the news, and letting the public in

I just posted a new blog at the Center on Communication Leadership and Policy. Its premise is that the public needs to be brought fully in to the discussion about journalism's future and sustainability.

I know some people are up to speed. But many others are not, and it's in everyone's interest to have this conversation spread as widely as possible. Why? Because Americans need to know that a fundamental institution of civic life faces an uncertain future, and because they might well have some interesting ideas about what to do about it.

I'm pushing back here against what strikes me as an unhealthy response by many new-media thinkers. As a group, they've been scornful of recent ideas for paying for the news, including proposals involving philanthropy and online micro-payments. There are good reasons for their skepticism, but my view is all hands on deck for this discussion. There's already been more idea exchange on this front, in the last 10 days, than I've seen in a long time.

'Time for grown-ups to intervene'

This week we've seen a couple of strong pushbacks against the ideas, seemingly gathering speed, that newspapers are toast and that what they have produced will be entirely replaceable in the new-media world.

The first came from my former McClatchy boss, Howard Weaver, who took strong issue with the notion that the new-media world has ready-to-go answers for for the jobs that newspaper staffs do now. Here's a taste:

"... The digitalistas who suggest those newsrooms can be readily duplicated or replaced act like willful children, unmindful that substance, craft and capacity matter in the real world, that no group of 10,000 monkeys has ever written Shakespeare, that 98 of the 100 most important pieces of public service journalism last year flowed from professionals in the newsrooms they recklessly disregard.

This is a fool’s game. It’s time for grown-ups to intervene, to end the debate and move beyond the empty calories of nostalgia and the masturbatory fantasies of a theory-based future."

By the way, I disagree with my friend and ex-boss in his disdain for the idea of philanthropy-funded journalism. I do agree it's not the Holy Grail and certainly not going to be any kind of salvation for old-time journalism. But it's a mistake, I think, to take it off the table. Philanthropy already does provide for some great journalism (hello, NPR, hello, ProPublica). It might have a small role but in many, many places.

But back to the main point. A widely admired grown-up, Steve Yelvington, took Howard's bait and reminded everyone today that newspapers are not only not dead; they're still huge money-making machines.

"I really hate being in a position of defending the newspaper industry. It's much more fun, and in the big picture perhaps more productive, to kick it in the pants. But I have to call bullshit on the "Newspapers Are Dead" meme.

No, they're not. Neither is print. Schadenfreude and gravedancing do not advance a rational conversation about how journalism will work going forward, and irrational negativity will not help us invent the future."

I am still relatively new to the culture of new media thinkers, but I believe I understand some of what drives them past realty in declaring newspapers dead. First, many would say newspapers are on the road to death and are traveling down it at a pretty good clip. Second, there's a culture of bold prediction in this group; you can see now there are constant self-references in blogs and tweets to their early, correct predictions of the past. Finally, some portion (I believe) would not be at all unhappy with legacy media's thorough demise, out of a belief that their ways and actions have been so injurious that it's better to start afresh. (And out of a belief that the networked world of the future will come up with a much better brand of journalism.)

My own guess: There's a decent chance that this better future will come, at least in many respects. But I can also imagine that it won't, or will have other faults that will exceed the current ones. I also believe the heart of today's journalism (public-service and watchdog journalism) is anything but malignant. Are there exceptions to this? Yes, but they're rare, and I don't see any near-term replacement for it.