Should Newspapers Become Local Blog Networks?

publishing2.com

5 points·rchambers··4 comments

Chicago Tribune just relaunched its website with, of course, more blogs -- A LOT more blogs -- news, entertainment, sports, living, business travel, with multiple blogs in each category.

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The killer-app of newspapers is good journalism and reporting from the scene of something interesting. Newspapers fail to do either well today, and wonder why they suffer so much.

Bloggers can help -- but not for foreign reporting (aside from foreign bloggers). That is where the money behind news rooms actually would have a huge effect.

Foreign reporting, incidentally, is where traditional media sucks the most. Judging by your name, you can probably appreciate this yourself, by reading a few articles about Russia in English or American papers (as long as we don't count exile.ru to as an American paper).

It seems like the most natural model would be pro-am collaboration. For example, investigative journalists publish research and then let amateurs incorporate this into their own publications. This is basically what is happening already, so with only a few tweaks it would be possible to both greatly increase the quality and also monetize the whole process.

This complicated three-tiered model seems about as workable as the Ptolemaic universe. Much better I think just to give readers the tools to go in the direction they are already taking on their own.

No. :-)

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