Posted on October 15, 2009 by jestevens
This wonderful post from Nieman Labs last month chronicles the hectic lives of AnnArborChronicle.com’s editor and publisher, and offers a 10-point overview of their working lives.
It doesn’t seem as if they have a non-working life. Which is why I hope these local niche news sites form networks someday to share news, information and advertising resources.
Here are points 5, 6, and 7. Check out the post for the rest of the story.
5. Google News Alerts every morning. Has any other service been adopted by every newsroom in the country with so 
little fanfare? The Chronicle is no exception; each morning, Morgan selects a handful of items from her 12 news alerts for phrases like “university of michigan” and “washtenaw county” for two news-from-out-of-town aggregators.
6. More than 20 public meetings a month. No, Mr. Simon, most local-news blogs don’t staff zoning hearings. But many do, and the Chronicle is one. When they launched, Morgan and Askins built their monthly schedule around a list of meetings the Ann Arbor News wasn’t covering. Today, exhaustive summaries of Ann Arbor’s Public Market Advisory Commission, Public Art Commission and Downtown Development Authority meetings are the Chronicle’s bread and butter, filling almost half its editorial time.
7. Two sets of eyes on every full story. A 5,000-word meeting story might take six hours to write and two to edit, Morgan said.
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Posted on October 9, 2009 by jestevens
You know, I really try to focus on solutions, leaning forward into journalism’s transition, maybe even contributing to it a tiny bit. And then I see another example of poor reporting from a traditional media journalist covering emerging journalism. This week’s bad boy is Newsweek, which did another pat-the-poor-little-hyperlocal-blog-on-the-head-and-say-there-there article.
Check out this sentence, which appeared early in the article:
Thousands of hyperlocal sites have now sprouted nationwide. But the model has yet to produce a seminal success story—and in fact there have been significant failures, including LoudonExtra, which shuttered last month.
And then several paragraphs later, this:
Web-news guru Jeff Jarvis, director of the interactive-journalism program at the City University of New York, has done an extensive study of hyper-local economics, and he’s optimistic. “The most startling and hopeful number I have found is this: some hyper-local bloggers, serving markets of about 50,000, are bringing in up to $200,000 a year in advertising,” he says.
Didja think to ask Jeff to identify the successful hyper-local bloggers?
And, one more thing while I’m on this rant, hyper-local is the most stupid term I’ve heard in a long time. I admit that I was guilty of using it for a while. Then, I put my thinking cap on and realized that journalists were using the term to describe people — often journalists — who were covering communities of 30,000 or 50,000. Ho. That’s a good-sized small town. Most of those small towns have honest-to-god newspapers. Do you call the reporters at those small dailies and weeklies hyper-local journalists? No, you call them journalists.
So, Johnnie L. Roberts and the folks at Newsweek who further poo-poohed the emergence of the new type of journalism by giving the headline PeytonPlace.com to the article, you blew it! You missed the real story! Check out WestSeattleBlog.com, QuincyNews.org, Baristanet.com, the new KansasCityKansan.com, and dozens of other local Web-based news organizations that are making it. And while you’re at it, check out the hundreds of topic-based niche news sites that are employing thousands of jurnos, and are raking in hundreds of millions of dollars.
Filed under: Jurno, Niche news | 1 Comment »
Posted on September 21, 2009 by jestevens
Well, yes, Mr. Moore, they did. But it was a little more complex than the reasons you gave. 
Newspapers lost their way when they became public corporations, beholden to shareholders and not their communities;
Newspapers lost their way when they hired publishers and upper management who didn’t come from news organizations, but from cereal companies;
Newspapers lost their way when they thought the Internet was a fad and/or a separate income-stream;
Newspapers lost their way when they thought they didn’t have to modernize and kept calling themselves newspapers.
The information and news from businesses in a geographic or topic-based community is just as valuable to the community as the news provided by journalists.
Hundreds of ad-supported niche news organizations have emerged during this transition. They’re employing thousands of modern journalists. We’re trying to lasso them into one place on the Jurnos wiki.
They’ve developed a business model. It’s working.
But, as Judy Sims recently pointed out in her SimsBlog, the lies that newspaper executives are telling themselves will prevent most of MSM from making the transition. But not my shop.
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Posted on August 27, 2009 by jestevens
Hey — did you catch this?
The Seattle Times partners with neighborhood news blogs
and from the horse’s mouth itself:
Seattle Times partners with neighborhood news sites
The partnership is part of a project made possible by a grant from J-Lab: The Institute for Interactive Journalism, which is in turn financed by the Knight Foundation.
and from WestSeattleBlog, with 25 comments:
WSB to collaborate with the Northwest’s biggest news organization
and from J-Lab, which announced the project that’s funded by the Knight Foundation:
Five News Organizations Join Networked Journalism Project
This is terrific. Remember that post I did a while ago? A Modest Proposal for the Seattle Times?
I hope this is the first step of the transition of that organization, with its deep commitment to journalism and its expertise in Seattle issues. Perhaps they’ll eventually develop a structure similar to the metro news ecology matrix (again, pardon the execution of the graphic) I put together. For those of you who missed it the first time, here it is again.
This could be a win-win approach for all folks committed to making sure that the Seattle community continues to be served by jurnos and journalism. Moving from a we-talk-you-listen approach to a solution-oriented collaborative conversation that’s embedded in a matrix of context and continuity is the only way to go. And, contrary to the poor reporting in the traditional media about the evolution of niche news organizations, the effort already is and can be supported by advertising, because businesses that provide products and services are an important part of the community, and their information is news and information, too.
For a list of niche news organizations that are ad-supported, check out the Jurnos wiki.
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Posted on August 27, 2009 by jestevens
THIS is:
The model works only if a bunch of salespeople pound the pavement, or if a company like AOL with a network of large advertisers offers them geo-targeted ads as part of a bigger package, said Greg Sterling, an analyst who blogs about these issues at Screenwerk. “I suspect The Washington Post maybe made assumptions about acquiring advertisers that didn’t turn out to be true,” he said.
Soooooo….this means that WestSeattleBlog, QuincyNews.org, Baristanet — all the asterisk-marked news organizations on the Jurnos wiki are what…..faking it? actually living off lottery winnings? being supported by a rich uncle?
The article in the NYTimes, from which I quoted (above) — Washington Post Ends Hyperlocal News — has been sitting in a row of Firefox browser tabs for a week while I 
decided whether to say something about it. I do my best to ignore bad reporting like this. I try to focus on creating new methods and structures to ensure that journalism’s vital role in our communities continues. But traditional media doesn’t seem to do much else except bad reporting about this subject. I’ll just put the transition to conversation-based and niche news in with the categories of coverage of the runup and first two years of the Iraq War, the U.S. financial crisis, and crime reporting.
There are some issues and developments that whole cultures (cultures within news organizations, cultures within governments, etc.) deny, even though they occur right in front of their eyes. Nassim Nicholas Taleb described the phenomenon in The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, Ori Brafman and Ron Brafman did the same in Sway: The Irresistible Pull of Irrational Behavior.
The crack that formed between traditional we-talk-you-listen mass media and conversational niche media over the last couple of years has grown to a chasm. What much of traditional media doesn’t grok yet is that great swaths of niche media are going their own way, while traditional media marches on into irrelevancy. Sad, very sad. [Cross-posted in RJICollaboratory]
Oh, yeah: Sorry for the long absence. The new job’s been taking up all my time.
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Posted on April 12, 2009 by jestevens
Here’s the third in a series of ReJurno’s case studies – CapitolHillSeattle.com. Justin Carder launched his startup news site on a Neighborlogs CMS 
about a year ago. Neighborlogs is a free platform (CMS and hosting) for people who want to start niche-based news sites. Carder does business development for Instivate, the company that owns Neighborlogs.
Carder’s in good company in Seattle, where several niche-based news sites have debuted over the last couple of years: Tracy Record and Patrick Sand’s WestSeattleBlog (the case study is here); the topic-based niche site TechFlash (case study coming soon); and Cory and Kate Bergman’s Next Door Media, which publishes My Ballard, PhinneyWood, MagnoliaVoice, FremontUniverse, and QueenAnneView.
Carder, who says that Tracy and Patrick are his mentors, takes a slightly different approach in CapitolHillSeattle. While Tracy’s goal is to cover as many West Seattle’s events and issues as possible, Carder focuses on providing a unique perspective to issues that might be covered by his competitors and on nurturing local storytellers.
CHS is, in a sense, also a proof-of-concept for Neighborlogs. Neighborlogs isn’t like Patch.com, which sets a reporting framework and hires reporters. It’s a free one-stop-shopping blogging platform for people who want to do a startup that offers self-serve advertising, but who don’t want to mess much with software. I’ll be doing a case study on Neighborlogs….AFTER I finish the next case study on TechFlash.
As the wait-staff says in some of those trendy Seattle restaurants: Enjoy!
(What would Russell Brand say????)
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Posted on April 5, 2009 by jestevens
No, not the marriage kind. The getting-the-community-interested-in-what-we’re-doing kind. My belief is that if 
jurnos serve a community’s needs — asking them first and continuously what they need and want — then it’ll happen naturally.
Keith Hammonds distilled an interesting discussion about engagement from the Dowire news-online group, and put it on Ashoka’s News & Knowledge Entrepreneurs blog. It’s worth taking a look.
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Posted on March 10, 2009 by jestevens
While 24/7WallSt lists the top 10 newspapers that are likely to close or go entirely online, a newly laid-off journalist is a week into the launch of another niche site.
On Feb. 23, Greg Hernandez was laid off from the LA Daily News, where he’d been doing the Out in Hollywood blog. Seven days later, he launched Greg in Hollywood. 
He had help from some very talented friends, and they worked ’round the clock to do a technology makeover on him (new computer, iPhone, Twitter lessons…he had the blogging down) to get him up and running. Here’s the whole story, from his perspective. I just loved how they found their graphic designer via Twitter.
Then read searchmeister Danny Sullivan’s account from a tech and search perspective: Behind the Scenes from the Greg in Hollywood Launch. Fascinating.
Since the launch, Greg’s doing three to seven posts/day, and seems to be having a blast.
So far, he’s using Google ads, but is soliciting advertising on his site. I’ll check in with him in a few months to see how the new jurno’s doing.
To add to the case studies on ReJurno, I’m interviewing jurnos from a couple of other Web-based niche news organizations this week: John Cook at TechFlash and Justin Carder from CapitolHillSeattle. Quite a few geographic- and topic-based sites have been launched in Seattle….enough starter to get a network going?
Filed under: Advertising, Jurno, Startups | Tagged: Advertising, Jurno, nichification, Startups | Leave a Comment »
Posted on March 7, 2009 by jestevens
When Bob Gough lost his job as news director at a Quincy, IL, TV station in October 2007, he had a choice: Move t
o another city or figure out another way to stay in the journalism biz in Quincy. He didn’t want to move — Quincy was his home. He had a wife with a successful career there, and three kids who weren’t keen on pulling up roots.
So, he figured out another way: He found a couple of local investors and, on April 28, 2008, launched a local Web-based news organization: QuincyNews.org.
The good news: he’s making a living….$1,000/week. He loves what he’s doing. The site is growing. And so far there isn’t any bad news.
Check out all the details, from soup to nuts, in ReJurno’s latest case study. And if there’s anything else you want to know, just ask and we’ll be glad to provide more info.
Filed under: Advertising, Jurno, NuJurno, Startups | Tagged: Advertising, Bob Gough, Jurno, nichification, QuincyNews.org, Startups | Leave a Comment »
