Here’s an interesting story from Newsonomics about what’s happening in the online world of news. Big news companies are partnering with new aggregators, and it’s changing the landscape:
The idea of the FWIX’s and Outside.ins: provide a round-up of the best local news, by aggregating local news sources, big-time and small, blog, story and broadcast, professional and user-gen, applying some hierarchy of quality to it. Both efforts race for the same audiences and related advertising as the original content-creators, AOL’s newly expanding Patch and Examiner.com. In addition to those of course, the number of hyperlocal efforts increases by the day (and some of them are being rounded up by local dailies, witness the Seattle Times aggregation, for instance).
For newspaper companies, it’s a smart move. It’s the end of an era, and the Times is clearly moving on a new philosophy: gather as much higher-quality content under its brands, national and regional, on as low a cost basis as possible.
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The new-fangled word for it is curation, rounding up lots of content, providing some hierarchy of value. Of course, it’s just good editing, bolstered by intelligent technology, and a growing flexibility to accept and work with a wider world of voices, styles and views.
Importantly, it also asserts that readers are smart: they can tell the difference between a New York Times (or Sarasota Herald) byline and that of a community contributor. That assertion is a Pro-Am gamble for the Times and all proud brands, but it’s one that should be made — and backed up with clear, prominent and never-ending disclosure.
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It’s a confusing landscape. What’s local? What’s national? What’s digital? What’s print? It’s a patchwork age, and nobody’s got the answers, but as home turfs have shrunken everywhere, everyone’s looking for new lands to conquer.
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The key phrases from the Newsonomics story may be these: (emphases added)
a round-up of THE BEST local news
applying some HIERARCHY OF QUALITY to it
gather as much HIGHER-QUALITY CONTENT
rounding up lots of content, providing some HIERARCHY OF VALUE. OF COURSE, IT’S JUST GOOD EDITING . . .
By inviting Ashvegas to join the Citizen-Times, in some yet-unexplained, still mysterious relationship/format, the AC-T editors/managers must have realized that their LINC project was not succeeding. Except for the Southern Highland Reader, apparently originated and run by a professional journalist, the blogs they chose to showcase had little appeal to general readers. And why would anyone need to "link" to those blogs through the newspaper’s Web site, instead of just visiting them directly? A blog about art projects for kids? A link to an earnest but amateurish school newspaper? (The journalism professors at UNCA, in the name of not interfering with the freedom of the student press, apparently give the student journalists little guidance about researching, sourcing, writing and reporting hard news.) A neighborhood association newsletter? The inexplicable AskAsheville, whose home page just seems to be list of other sites?
So will the Citizen-Times and Ashvegas follow through with the points made by Newsonomics: BEST local news. . HIGHER-QUALITY CONTENT . . .GOOD EDITING?
Good editing may be the key that trumps them all. In today’s Citizen-Times, for example, the health reporter, Nanci Bompey, has a feature story on meals for kids at local grocery stories. This in the days after the passage of the historic health care reform bill? The editors run a wire service story on "Health Care: What’s Next" and an uncredited string of superficial "sound bites" from locals who may, or may not, have any deep knowledge of the bill just passed. One of them, a manager at Mission Hospitals, the "stringer of quotes" noted, "may be one of the few people in Asheville who has read the health care bill in its entirety." Had the health reporter read the bill in its entirety? Did she sit down with someone who had and get it thoroughly explained to her?
Why didn’t an editor throw that piece of lazy journalism back to the reporter and tell him/her to dig more deeply, report in more detail? Talk to more people who had "read the bill in its entirety" and get some authoritative information.
Perhaps more to the point, knowing the bill either would or would not pass, why wasn’t the health reporter (and others) already working on an in-depth story to run on Monday, the day after the bill was up for a vote?
As much as this newspaper reader admires Ashvegas, I fear we’re about to see this blog repeat, with the rumor of scandal at City Hall, the same type of rumor-reporting (and not investigative reporting )that it provided about Mission Hospital. Yes, that appears to have resulted in the toppling of a much-disliked administrator. But the public never received a detailed, fact-checked, analytical, objective report on what was really going on at Mission and what it meant to the general, hospital-depending public.
So what reporter, what newspaper, is already digging, in a professional way, into the rumor of corruption at City Hall?