C'mon in! Grab some coffee, write some news



The Register Citizen in Torrington, Conn., posted this rendering
of its new "open newsroom" project.


Once upon a time, when I worked for a niche weekly, I delivered a camera-ready help-wanted ad to the big local daily. I walked in the front door of the daily's building, inquired at the information desk on where to go, then almost rode the elevator upstairs with the paper's editor and publisher.

I would have enjoyed eavesdropping on their conversation (Hey, fellas, got any news I can poach?), but they, alas, stayed behind after we exchanged some pleasantries.

I delivered my ad, took the elevator back to the ground floor, then returned to my own newsroom.

Fast forward a few years and I was working at that daily, and no one  -- employee or outsider -- got anywhere in the building without a company-issued swipe card. Security concerns post-9/11 were the immediate cause of the installation of new electronic door locks everywhere, but I'm sure there was some peace of mind that no one -- foreign or domestic -- with a gripe against the paper might wander in.

That's why it seemed so radical that The Register Citizen in Torrington, Conn., decided to move its newsroom to new, coffeehouse-like space and invite the public in. It's all part of an effort by Journal Register Co., parent company to 19 daily and 150 weekly newspapers and affiliated websites, to remake itself as an open system in which readers are encouraged to participate -- as tipsters, barometers of coverage, even writers.

"Bringing the audience into the physical space and providing a welcoming area for readers and staff to interact will continue to foster greater engagement," says John Paton, Journal Register CEO, who began to champion openness soon after joining the company earlier this year, just as it emerged from bankruptcy reorganization.

Newspapers talk a good game of audience engagement. We invite readers to attend editors' daily meetings on coverage and story placement, then are surprised when anyone wants to. And look at how the New York Times' TimesCast morphed from a videotaped peek at the morning news meeting to a high-quality broadcast more akin to a five-minute TV-headlines show.

So throwing the doors wide open in Torrington -- "With no walls, literally, between the Newsroom Café and The Register Citizen newsroom where reporters and editors work," says its publisher -- will be an experiment worth watching.

Use your weekend well: read!

(via Flickr: jj_pappas423)

It's going to be a long weekend for some as they enjoy the Columbus Day holiday on Monday, so there will be plenty of time to get into these:

"Citizen Journalists? Spreading Like a Cold" (Miami Herald): At the risk of being impolitic -- or a dinosaur -- I got a chuckle out of this column by Leonard Pitts Jr. Written ostensibly to criticize the latest "sting" shenanigans of James O'Keefe III, he of pimp, prostitute and ACORN scandal fame, it just went off on the idea that anyone with access to the Web should be considered a journalist:

If some guy had a wrench, would that make him a citizen mechanic? If some woman flashed a toy badge, would you call her a citizen police officer? Would you trust your health to a citizen doctor just because he produced a syringe? Of course not. But every Tom, Dick and Harriet with a blog is a "citizen journalist."

The column earned a slap on Twitter from media critic Jay Rosen ("Just got off the phone with the museum of curmudgeon studies. They won't take this, even as a donation"), and grimaces from others over this analogy:  "...citizen journalism is to journalism as pornography is to a Martin Scorsese film: while they may employ similar tools -- i.e., camera, lighting -- they aspire to different results."

"Reform the Media? How 2009." (Xark): Dan Conover says it's easy to look at an analysis of what went wrong when Sam Zell took over Tribune Co. and put the blame on money-grubbing egomaniacs. But, he posits, "The truth of the matter is that the biggest obstacles to meaningful reform include many of the most well-meaning 'good-guys' in the New Media game."

So Conover, a newspaper veteran, outlines what he sees as the "simple truths" of today's media landscape before concluding: "It's time to stop talking about saving the news media, reforming the news media, or even politely waiting for these old companies to die a dignified death." Instead, it's time to blow them up.

Musical interlude No. 1.

Here's a three-fer on local news startups:

1. "New Voices: What Works" (J-Lab): Jan Schaffer, who runs J-Lab: The Institute for Interactive Journalism at American University in Washington, D.C., reports on five years' worth of lessons learned from the four dozen community news projects launched since 2005 with financial help from a John S. and James L. Knight Foundation grant administered by her group. Her list of "takeaways" includes several interesting points: that citizen journalists are a high-churn way to get content; that the sites aren't replacing local coverage lost as legacy media have contracted; that the projects haven't yet grown into self-sustaining businesses.
2. "Community News Sites Are Not a Business Yet" (Reflections of a Newsosaur): Alan Mutter picks up on that last "takeaway" in a post on his blog that praises Schaffer for the research in her New Voices report but laments that none of the sites has found the "magic bullet for saving journalism." On the plus side, some of the sites have survived longer than the typical new small businesses, Mutter says.
3. "Local Startups Seek 'Future of Journalism'" (NetNewsCheck): One weakness of local news startups, mentioned before by Mutter and picked up here, is that while laid-off journalists may have the essential news-gathering skills to launch local sites, they often lack the business savvy needed to sustain them. Or, as one former journalist who now studies startups noted, the journalist-turned-publisher is "pathologically unable to talk about money."

Musical interlude No. 2: I often tune out the pre-flight safety rundown offered by the airlines (especially if I'm on multiple takeoffs and landings in the same day), but I'm sure I would have paid attention to these.

I'm channeling Archie Bunker

Remember Edith, wife of Archie Bunker in the 1970s TV sitcom "All in the Family"?

I decided today I'm as over-the-top exasperated with journalism as Archie was with Edith when she seesawed her way through "The Change" (menopause).

Here's the money quote in that episode, about 3:25 into the YouTube clip below: "Edith, if you're gonna have a change of life, you gotta do it right now. I'm gonna give you just 30 seconds. Now c'mon, change!" (Sorry, but it appears that episode has been scrubbed by YouTube. Too bad.)



I'd like to say that to the news business: If you're gonna change, do it already!

Paywall or no paywall? Ad-supported or not-for-profit? Career journalists or citizen journalists? Multi-media or overwhelmed?

There's no question the established newspaper model is changing. (Note, though, that at least a majority of regular readers would miss their newspaper if it were to disappear.)

But while we journalists can feel the base shifting beneath us, we don't yet know how to regain our footing. That leaves some of us yelling, like Archie, "C'mon, change!"

Where's our rock, our Edith?