Notes about the Future of Urban Journalism, Part 4

Is this the post-newspaper future of local news?

What might a good, post-newspaper local news organization look like? What content would it offer? How would it be staffed and funded?

As market resources dwindle and online news consumption increases, producers of local journalism will experiment with a variety of forms. It’s possible we’ll all be getting our local news from bloggers. It’s possible newspapers—looking and acting like magazines—will survive as a viable form. It’s possible local public radio stations will become the primary local news organizations—with radio, Web, print and video offerings.

I don’t know enough about how online advertising works, about the costs of news production or the habits and preferences of news consumers to predict what’s likely to succeed newspapers. But I do know cities will suffer if there’s no good local journalism of the right scope, depth and frequency.

I also know I’ve been daydreaming about what the future of urban journalism might look like. Here are some highlights.

There’s a fabulous, ambitious online news site. Most of what you got from a local newspaper, you’ll get here: news and feature stories about all things local—politics, business, crime, culture and sports. You’ll find obituaries and weather forecasts, too. Photos. Video clips. It’s updated 24/7/52. What you won’t get here is national and international news from wire services. This is all local. The site is uncluttered, easy to read and navigate, and contains only a few discreet, non-up-popping ads. Every article and every photo are easy to print, and there’s free access to the archives. This site is the news organization’s flagship site, and it links to all the content described below.

A real newspaper for Sundays. For old-fashioned newspaper readers, this is the real thing: news printed on paper, available at newsstands or delivered to your door. While this paper contains a summary of the week’s news, its serious fare is mainly devoted to providing in-depth analysis and background on major local issues. But Sunday reading can’t all be serious, which is why the paper contains lots of cartoons and other interesting and fun stuff to read. All the paper’s content—except for the peppermint scent of its entertainment section—is available at the flagship site, too. The paper is free, although there is a charge for home delivery.

An audio-visual department. Which produces audio and video supplements to the news content, but also creates stand-alone documentaries about local places, people and issues. The digital documentaries—some of which use computer generated animation—are also used at public forums sponsored by the news organization and are broadcast on local radio and televisions stations.

E pluribus, opinion. There is no official editorial position of the news organization. But there are plenty of regular columnists and invited commentators. Most of these opinion writers are locals, but experts from outside of the community are frequently asked to comment on or provide advice about local issues. Site editors frequently post collections of downloadable background materials and links to hot opinion topics.

A city guide like you’ve never seen before. This guide doesn’t list restaurants and bars. It doesn’t describe local shopping districts. It’s a power guide, and what it does is explain the city’s formal (government) and informal (lobbyists, interest groups, activists, opinion leaders) power structure. It summarizes the key issues facing the city, and profiles the major people and groups involved with those issues. The guide offers lots of advice from battle-tested activists—locals and outsiders—about how to get city hall to listen. It’s available in print and online. Both versions are free, and the print version is mailed to every registered voter in town.

Users contribute content and feedback. While the professionally produced content is carefully distinguished from content produced by users, user-generated content and feedback is everywhere. Comments on articles. Polling on issues. Ranking of articles. Frequent requests for story and photo ideas. Posting of user generated photos and video clips. Reports on what local bloggers are saying. As part of the opinion pages, there’s a “soap box” section that allows anyone to post comments about anything of any length, subject only to minimum civility standards.

It’s funded a lot like public radio stations are. Generous local philanthropists and hugely successful membership drives provide the bulk of funding. The online news site and the Sunday paper both run ads, but the number and size of the ads are minimal in compared to current commercial newspapers and their Web sites. Firewalls separate the revenue side from the editorial side. Everybody involved with this news organization regards local news as a vital public service, not a moneymaking enterprise. (Yes, there’s a bit of snobbery about that.)

Produced by city-loving professional journalists. Because it takes a lot of resources and expertise to reliably produce good journalism—and this includes everything from news briefs to in-depth articles, from photos to info graphics—this news organization employs professionals. But not just any professionals. Apply here only if you have some talent, and can honestly claim at least these three things: 1. Cities baffle and intrigue you, and you want to figure out how they work; 2. You like complexity, but you really like explaining complicated things in an accessible and witty way; and 3. You love cities, even if it’s sometimes a tortured love.

* * *

Well, that was my latest daydream about a possible local news organization in a post-newspaper world. I’d like to know how others see the future of urban journalism. Please add your predictions, your daydreams as comments to this post.

This is the forth--and final--part of a series of posts about the future of urban journalism. Read the rest of the series: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3.

(Photo from Flickr user Joe Thorn. The original full-sized color version can be viewed by clicking the photo.)

Digital Density

CHICAGO, 2008

Dense concentrations of people = dense concentrations of information. Will the NIMBYs of the digital city complain about websites that ruin the character of neighborhood infoclouds? Or perhaps block new sites from launching because they displace smaller, scrappier sites with more interesting content? Will the artistic streetpunks and art insurgents of tomorrow be carefully and sneakily grafting their tag onto Flickr images?

Is the future of urban activism electronic?

Community 2.0 and the Built Environment: Communeconomics

It's not exactly news that the internet is an innovative marketplace. While the urban commercial landscape is fairly predictable (commercial activity centers on and near arterial streets to take advantage of concentrated traffic), online marketers are continually figuring out newer and more effective ways to sell you more stuff and/or services. There are no streets in the virtual world along which to concentrate retail. Instead, websites with something to sell (which means every site with a .com address and then some) must take the idea of the traditional urban retail corridor forming a sort of informal, symbiotic and vaguely cross-promotional environment and try to replicate it. As technology has evolved, direct cross-promotional advertising and monitored preferences have created their own commercial "arterials," increasing commercial activity by focusing marketing efforts on increasingly specific audiences.

As Community 2.0 technology begins to influence this evolution, the internet is starting to change how retail is organized at the local level. 43 Places, from the people who brought us 43 Things and 43 People (surprised?), allows users to create pages for locations as specific as individual businesses within their neighborhoods. Well-regarded services like Yelp and UrbanSpoon (which is one of my favorite sites) allow people to check out businesses and restaurants in their neighborhood that provide both sponsored and user-generated reviews and ratings. Local businesses like the third places described in yesterday's post can become exponentially more popular as they receive free, customer/user-based publicity on the web. And with services like Twitter facilitating mass texting, web-based social groups can move their operations off of their desktops and into the proverbial real world. And with neighborhood-focused sites on the horizon, the need for web presence increases for local businesses looking to attract these highly wired groups to hold their meetings at these businesses. (I apologize for the wording there...it's a bit awkward.)

The internet is changing the model for independent, locally-based businesses. For the first time, these businesses are being provided with a marketing tool that allows them to level the playing field, somewhat, with large chain stores that spend more money on marketing than most independents spend in a year. (I'm guessing, but could you honestly say that's a stretch?) Local, community-based businesses have long been shown to reinvest more of their profits in the local community; now, C2.0 tech is enabling people to invest in their communities by promoting local businesses in an unprecedented way. One particularly exciting possibility for this symbiotic relationship is the strengthening of local businesses in the face of gentrification. While the question of how to provide equitable housing to residents in gentrifying neighborhoods remains unanswered, the C2.0 movement is providing a potential answer for business owners who provide a high-quality product but can't otherwise compete against international, hyperbranded machines.

There are an infinite number of ways that this could all play out, so I'm not going to try to make any predictions. But a suggestion, perhaps? I'd like to highlight a website that I almost featured in a Conscious Urbanism post a few weeks ago but decided to save for this series: Kiva.org. From their website: "Kiva lets you connect with and loan money to unique small businesses in the developing world. By choosing a business on Kiva.org, you can "sponsor a business" and help the world's working poor make great strides towards economic independence. Throughout the course of the loan (usually 6-12 months), you can receive email journal updates from the business you've sponsored. As loans are repaid, you get your loan money back."

This wonderful service has an international focus. The idea, however, is easily transferable to the local level. This type of service, replicated in the urban centers of the developed world, could do some pretty amazing things. Imagine a site that allowed neighbors to make small donations or loans to local businesses to help with repairs, expansions, or infrastructure upgrades to help fend off encroaching corporate interests in a neighborhood. Or a site that, more closely along the lines of the Kiva model, facilitated loans from citizens to small business owners in depressed areas of their city in an effort to strategically combat poverty and relieve stress from the social services system. Or even a site that helped residents of a neighborhood to come together to determine what is lacking from their local retail/services district and create community loan funds to encourage and help neighbors who might be thinking about opening a business, or even to create community owned and operated establishments.

The possibilities for the Community 2.0-enhanced economy (or the communeconomy, as I've so facetiously nicknamed it for the sake of creating a snappy title) are endless, and have a great deal of potential in terms of not only empowering local residents to preserve the character of their neighborhoods, but also even to give people a reason to gather together, face-to-face, and really invest in their communities and each others' well-being. This all sounds pretty optimistic, I know, but I'm sure that Kiva's founders were told the same thing. And they've now loaned over $6 million to small business owners around the world.

Series Posts: Introduction; The New Agora; Neighborhood Futurism; The Phil Tadros Interview


Links:
43 Places, Yelp, and Twitter

UrbanSpoon (gets its own line for being so awesome...Chicago is the default, but there are several different cities along the top right of the page.)

Kiva.org (Photo from Kiva)

Community 2.0 and the Built Environment: An Introduction

Ours is a hyperlinked reality. As technology-enabled connectivity increases, we marvel at how our world seems to be shrinking before our very eyes. For decades now, if not longer, people have spoken of this phenomenon with a mixture of apprehension and bemusement. The apprehension comes from the fact that geography, one of the fundamental building blocks of our reality, is seemingly being relegated to a sort of background status -- an attractive desktop image for life, if you will. The bemusement is likewise rooted in the concrete nature of the physical environment: it never ceases to amaze us each time communicating with people on the other side of the world gets a bit easier because we understand physical distance on a very personal level. Thus the idea that we can communicate instantly with someone in China while sitting in a library in Boise, Idaho, by simply clicking some underlined text is...well...amusing, no matter how tech-savvy we happen to be.

Much as the automobile and its promise of increased physical mobility captured the public's imagination at the turn of the last century and rallied the masses around infrastructural and legislative capacity-building to enhance the automotive experience, the internet has transfixed the global community at the turn of this century by flashing us a future of greatly increased psychological mobility. China, now, is not nearly as far away -- nor as mysterious -- as it once was. Neither is Uraguay, or Romania for that matter. Physical and political boundaries are beginning to fade; the modern world is ours for the taking in a way that is much more immediate than it was twenty years ago.

As a result, it can sometimes seem like humanity is hurtling forward, with new technology (or at least new uses for existing tech) is developed and introduced to the public on an almost daily basis. And just as each technological revolution has had to prove its mettle over time, so has the internet; at first, there was a great deal of fear surrounding the dot com revolution, with people fearing that the world of online communities -- chat rooms, message boards, webcams -- would keep people locked away in their homes, glued to computer screens. Physical communities, we feared, would become a thing of the past. But now, it seems, we have reached the critical point at which people trust the web -- trust it enough to really take control of it.

The "Web 2.0" movement has become a pretty monumental phenomenon in a fairly short period of time. And it comes as no surprise, at least to me, that the interactive nature of collaborative media sites like Flickr, digg, Technorati, Myspace, and the like is not erasing, but re-shaping the way that we build communities. Special interest groups have evolved into social action coalitions. The Blogosphere (a phenomenon of which I am personally quite fond) has passed through its awkward, melodramatic LiveJournal stage and, aided greatly by user-generated media sites like YouTube, become a genuine media powerhouse credited with fundamentally altering political processes around the world. And social networking sites, while still in their own narcissistic adolescence, are slowly starting to show themselves to be, quite possibly, the most promising prospect on the e-horizon through sites like Idealist.org.

So how does this massive shift in the way that we experience life translate to the built environment? "Community 2.0," the communal side of Web 2.0 technology, is growing stronger as you read this, simply by virtue of the fact that you're reading it. Still, it is a young movement, and it is just now starting to show signs of how it will affect the physical landscapes of our cities and towns.

Over the coming week, I'll be using Where to look at what I consider to be the most intriguing and promising aspects of the web-enabled communities of the future. I'll be writing about the way that the internet is changing the way that we use and think about public space; the way that Community 2.0 sites are cutting through crap known as "infotainment" to shed light on some real problems -- and solutions; and the ways in which real estate and the very future of traditional urbanity will be affected by an increasingly mobile public. The series will culminate on Friday with an interview with Phil Tadros, an untraditional Chicago businessman who is applying the people-oriented, localized focus that made his "third place"-style coffee shops into community institutions to the social networking movement in a way that could change how we look at the relationship between electronic communities and our physical neighborhoods.

(Photo from the Internet Mapping Project.)

Series Posts: The New Agora; Communeconomics; Neighborhood Futurism; The Phil Tadros Interview