Disappearing from doorsteps all over America

(The tuatara, a "living fossil.")

Another longterm American legacy daily is disappearing.

The Seattle Post-Intelligencer will print its last issue next week, leaving Seattle a one-paper town.

The article in the Times reporting the closure is interesting because it discusses both sides of the "what's next" issue.

Joel Kramer of the online Minneapolis newsblog MinnPost.com, says that a newsblog can't compete with a daily:

“Places like us would spring up,” he said, “but they wouldn’t be nearly as big. We can tweak the papers and compete with them, but we can’t replace them.”

But Jeff Jarvis, of City University of New York, feels that online news sources will be the smaller, different, but vital sources of information that will replace dailies:

The death of a newspaper should result in an explosion of much smaller news sources online, producing at least as much coverage as the paper did, says Jeff Jarvis, director of interactive journalism at the City University of New York’s graduate journalism school. Those sources might be less polished, Mr. Jarvis said, but they would be competitive, ending the monopolies many newspapers have long enjoyed.

From my own experience, publishing news on the all-volunteer, citizen journalist newsblog, The Middletown Eye, I can say that we are not covering stories that the Hartford Courant has abandoned, and finding that we are beating the daily Middletown Press to other stories, and making them more likely to show up at town meetings they had otherwise shunned. To be fair, with a paid staff, they get to stories we can't get to, yet.

Journalists and editors at legacy dailies make much of the fact that blogs are frequently pointers to the journalist work of daily reporters. That's true, to some extent. But many webpapers, like the New Haven Independent, do their own reporting, and it's often superior to the competition. Others have said that there's no way to monetize the newsweb, pointing to the New York Times as an example. But the New York Times website is still competing with its own daily print version.

Print newspapers are the tuatara, living fossils which have outlived their era. They survive as long as the baby boom generation, and then, when their native habitat is gone.

The need for news, and for journalism, will not disappear. I have every faith that our natural curiousity about the crooks who run our government and businesses will keep journalism alive indefinitely.

Trained journalists

So, after volunteering to sit through a three hour Economic Development Committee meeting in Middletown, so that I could share the results with my fellow residents, I got home an listened, online to the podcast of Monday's Where We Live. The topic was "The Future of Newspapers."

It's a topic I'm passionate about, as a reader, a former newspaper writer, and a documentary film journalist.

I'm happy to say that an email I wrote to host John Dankosky got read on the air, but dismayed that the journalism professor (Paul Janesch) and the former NY Times reporter (Marcia Chambers) found it necessary to disparage the efforts of citizen journalism sites like The Middletown Eye, which I helped found.

Janesch posited that the Middletown Eye, and other local community newsblogs didn't display the journalistic discipline of real newspapers. Chambers indicated that unlike her newsite (kind of a blog), The Branford Eagle, The Middletown Eye is not staffed with "trained journalists."

Well.

The worst thing a "trained" journalist should do is presume that he or she knows something that he or she doesn't.

I detect a bit of journalistic snobbery.

First off, I won't pretend The Middletown Eye is something it isn't. We are not a website attached to a print newspaper. We do not have paid staff. We don't have an office, or the ability (time) to dig for all of our stories the way a paid staff might.

But don't get me wrong. I'm not apologizing. The Middletown Eye is staffed by community journalists of all stripes. Some indeed are what you might call "trained" journalists. They have experience writing for print newspapers, magazines and journals. Some are professors. Some are artists, musicians, stay-at-home parents, ministers, business owners, civic activists, university employees, architects, environmentalists and others who care deeply about the town in which we all live.

All of us know how to write. I would conjecture that some of us know a bit more about research than most "trained" and seasoned journalists.

I will tell you this. We have scooped the Hartford Courant and Middletown Press on a number of occasions. We have been the media source (unaccredited), for newspaper, TV and radio stories. We have written stories which have made the US Army change course. We have exposed local issues and controversies for public scrutiny. And we covered the last election in town like no other media outlet could or would.

We've been around for seven months.

We try mightily to keep opinion separate from news reporting (though we are not always successful). We discourage anything that smacks of personal vendetta. We refuse to print anonymous assaults (though we will print non-threatening anonymous comments). And we are respected by town municipal leaders and residents as an accurate source of information. Our readership is small, but growing.

Certainly, some of what Janesch and Chambers say a "newsblog" ought to aspire to are lofty goals (goals, I might add, that many newspapers do not achieve) - fairness, accuracy, objectivity (to the extent that it can ever be achieved), insight, institutional memory, clear and spirited writing. We hope to be able to offer all or those things to our readership, and more, including a dedication to making Middletown a great place to live, for everyone who lives here (without becoming mindless cheerleaders).

By the way, that Economic Development Committee meeting I sat through resulted in a post which revealed that a gourmet food manufacturer wants to move to Middletown. No other "trained" journalist was at the meeting to report that. You won't read about it in the Hartford Courant or Middletown Press today. It was in the Eye at midnight.

The trouble with newspapers, as I've said dozens of time, is not the reporters, editors, photographers or graphic artists who toil for the dailies. It's the absentee-landlord corporate owners who have hocked the papers into debt-holes from which it is impossible to climb.

Finally, if examples of "trained" journalists are what we find in the ineffectual Washington press corps, or on cable news channel, I'd rather remain untrained.

With one eye open

There's pleasant progress after just a week over at the Middletown Eye. We now have eight reporters/bloggers/authors, and eighteen posts, on everything from town development, to hiking the hills of Middletown, to seeing the town through the eyes of a visitor, through seeing the car show through the eyes of Pearse, to biking in Europe.

And it's only the first week. If you're interested in Middletown CT, I'd recommend a look see at the eye, and if you have any inclination to share your observations, I'd encourage you to write.

The eye is open

Check out a new Middletown Community blog - The Middletown Eye, designed to cover the community through the eyes of its residents.

Residents are welcome to submit postings.