aTypical Joe: a gay New Yorker living in the rural South

Saturday, July 21, 2007

Publishing 2.0 to newspapers: Stop publishing in print

Scott Karp says “blogs are now the organizing principle for newspapers’ original online content” and wonders if to fulfill the Fourth Estate mission in our digital media era maybe newspapers should become nothing more than local blog networks:

Maybe there are three tiers of journalists at these blog network “newspapers”:

1. Full-time reporters and editors, who ensure breadth of coverage, quality and standards, and public mission
2. Paid freelancers who write on a regular basis, but not full-time — these can be stay-at-home parents looking for supplemental income, retirees looking for extra income or to keep busy, college students, etc.
3. “Witness” reporters (avoiding “citizen journalist” on purpose), who contribute to the reporting effort when they witness news in some form

I like his formulation and have no doubt they should be; the question, rather, is how long until they will be?

Many newspapers are closer to this model than they may realize, but there a few radical steps required:

• Use more freelancers who can post to blogs part-time
  
• Create a platform for anyone to report news — but on the established blogs, not in some big sloshing vat of random submissions — if someone wants to contribute regularly, given them their own blog, a focus, and (just enough) structure

To really take advantage of the economies of this model, which could actually enable MORE local reporting, newspapers need to consider one final step — stop publishing in print.

Via Martin Stabe.