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News & events for Friday, March 19

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davidhinckley

Joined Feb. 12, 2009

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  • 11 months, 1 week ago
    davidhinckley's comment on:

    The trouble with mixed newsrooms

    Very nice.
  • 11 months, 3 weeks ago
    davidhinckley's comment on:

    Where are the local journalists?

    Mr. interstedcitizen, I think there is actually a large underserved segment of the population who wants what you want. So eventually, someone smart is going to start a news site that will focus on aggregating links to the type of content you're looking for, because while each publication does a few of those stories, the police blotter and AP wire are much more efficient in filling the paper. But an aggregator has no such constraints. Actually, I wouldn't be surprised if there's one already out there that suits what you're looking for on the national level. For example, I've found realclearpolitics.com to be a wonderful resource for elections and policy.
  • 11 months, 4 weeks ago
    davidhinckley's comment on:

    Where are the local journalists?

    "When I have a hard time organizing the facts about world events that dominate the front section of the newspaper, I really have a hard time paying attention to what is happening in Dallas County Schools."

    This is a good point, which I think gets to the heart of the problem. Day-to-day school policy is low enough on the list of priorities for most people that it doesn't draw the kind of readership that will support regular coverage. And like Mike said, this is a time when old journalism is declining and new journalism hasn't quite taken its place, leaving holes in coverage for those areas where interest is the lowest.

    The other big issue is that the public mentality hasn't quite caught up with the new media picture. I really believe that more and more, news sites will resemble Pegasus News, which means that a lot of the content will be produced by outside sources. Those sources in many cases won't be doing it as a day job, but they'll have enough interest in an area that they gather information for their own purposes and make modest profit by posting it on the web alongside Google ads. Maintaining that kind of site right now is already really easy, it's just that society hasn't gotten to the point where 1. enough people think to look to blogs as news sources, or 2. people with interest in a topic know they can take ownership of it.

    There will always be enough people interested in Dallas County Schools to support coverage by that model, even if the numbers will be modest. And for many topics on the day-to-day, that's really all the coverage we need. When news breaks that a wider audience will want to know about, the larger sources will aggregate the content, provide additional resources to cover it, or simply lend the support of their readers by linking to it. If public interest grows, the ad revenue might support one person doing full-time coverage. It's all supply and demand. At the moment, there's a small demand for coverage that's not fully being met in Dallas County. I think it's precisely people like Jeff Melcher who will fill it.