The future of newspapers?
This article in the Washington Post examines the direction the Fort Myers News-Press is moving in the Internet Age.
Myron, 27, is a reporter for the Fort Myers News-Press and one of its fleet of mobile journalists, or “mojos.” The mojos have high-tech tools — ThinkPads, digital audio recorders, digital still and video cameras — but no desk, no chair, no nameplate, no land line, no office. They spend their time on the road looking for stories, filing several a day for the newspaper’s Web site, and often for the print edition, too. Their guiding principle: A constantly updated stream of intensely local, fresh Web content — regardless of its traditional news value — is key to building online and newspaper readership.
This is beginning to sound familiar.
The event he just covered? The signing of a fundraising calendar for the local chamber of commerce featuring the Hunks of North Fort Myers. The event was held inside a gym beside a Winn-Dixie in a strip shopping center.
It had been looking dim — just three hunks and half a dozen seemingly uninterested middle-aged ladies working out nearby — when Myron arrived at the gym with his ThinkPad under one arm and a digital camera peeking out of a pocket of his khakis.
Twenty minutes passed before one senior citizen and her husband walked in with two calendars to be signed by the hunks. She agreed to be interviewed and have her picture taken by Myron. He took notes on the screen of his ThinkPad, using an electronic stylus.
Thirty minutes later, sitting in his car with a sense of relief, he has written a short story, cropped one digital picture, written a caption, uploaded it all to the Web and linked to a previous story he’d written on the calendar fundraiser. Traditionally, such a story would barely rise to the level of a newspaper’s weekly community insert. Yet this is the third story Myron has written on the calendar.
In the dark, Myron refreshed his browser and pulled up his fresh dispatch on the News-Press’s Cape Coral “micro-site,” one of several sites-within-a-site focusing on individual communities.
In other words, he’s blogging.
Some other innovations have also come from the world of blogs:
We’re trying a lot of things. Some will work; others won’t,” said Kate Marymont, 53, the energetic News-Press executive editor for the past six years and a Gannett lifer. “It’s like play.”
• The creation of 14 full- and part-time mojos. By the end of next year, the paper’s 30 other news reporters also will be mojos to one extent or another. The News-Press is nonunion.
• Enlisting the help of dozens of reader experts — retired engineers, accountants, government insiders — to review documents and data to determine why it costs so much to hook up water and sewer service to new homes in the area. The result: an investigative report that resulted in fees lowered by 30 percent and an official ousted. Gannett calls the practice “crowdsourcing.” The News-Press and other Gannett papers also are building searchable online databases on as many topics as they can think of, in part to “enable people to do digging themselves and maybe find conclusions we won’t,” said Michael Maness, Gannett’s vice president of strategic planning. “It’s having thousands of investigative reporters instead of three.”
OK, so reporters become, to all intents and purposes, bloggers, and the paper draws on Glenn Reynold’s “Army of Davids”. Other lines are blurring as well. Reporters are expected to be able to answer questions about ad rates, for example; the traditional division between news-gathering and other functions in a paper are “snobbery”.
Those people I know who turn up their noses at blogs may soon find there’s nothing else to read.
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