Peoria Pundit

Consider this passage from an On The Media interview with an investigative reporter from the Rocky Mountain News, the Denver-based newspaper that closed it’s doors last week.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: So, what stories were you working on the week the paper went under?

LAURA FRANK: What would have been in our Saturday paper, the first paper that The Rocky missed because of its closure, we had stories ready to go about a government agency that had allegedly misused public money, we had a story about how children in state custody were being abused. And we had a story about a bus driver in Denver who was helping an elderly lady and her daughter across the street when he was hit by another vehicle, and the State Patrol gave him a ticket for jaywalking. Our reporter was ready to write that the bus driver was actually in the legal crosswalk; he should never have been given the ticket at all.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Were these stories being covered by the – forgive me – Denver Post?

LAURA FRANK: In this case, no, none of these stories have been covered by the other media.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Where do these stories go now?

LAURA FRANK: Well, I’ll tell you, it’s interesting, because on Monday Kevin Flynn, one of our terrific reporters who was working on that jaywalking story, went ahead and published it online. When the Scripps Company announced The Rocky Mountain News was for sale December 4th, some of the staffers created a website called Iwantmyrocky.com, and it’s been a place for people to post their feelings and concerns and to get to know the staff of The Rocky a little bit better. Kevin posted his story right at the top of Iwantmyrocky.com, and others are continuing to do that. You know, when you’re a reporter, reporting is in your DNA, you can’t just pull the stops and quit. So, some of it’s still going, actually.

The lesson from this? The reporters gathered the content, and delivered it themselves. Without the direct approval of any greedhead media company. They might as well have walked into any library with free-to-use Internet-read computers and uoloaded it to a free Blogger blog.

I’ve said this is zillion times. Online is the cure for what ails the newspapers. The way to save newspapers is to stop printing on paper and start printing on the Internet. If media companies are too chicken to change, then they will due. Companies need to bite the  bullet and set date for when their companies will be all on line.

The entire segmentis available in mp3 format.

UPDATE: Commenter Eyebrows McGee wonders how the former Rocky writers are getting paid. Answer: They weren’t. But that doesn’t mean that they and other will never get paid for writing online only. All it takes is is some entrepreneurship:

March 10 (Bloomberg) — As newspapers hemorrhage money and cut staff, the future of the industry is playing out in the suburb of Maplewood, New Jersey.

Internet sites have started blanketing the town with press coverage, with a new Web venture backed by a Google Inc. executive battling two locally run Web pages for readers. The New York Times joined the fray this month with a Maplewood blog. Their prize: online ads from local companies — the fastest- growing source of revenue for the news business.

Meanwhile, the greed-heads who own printing-press based media companies fume about how Google is “stealing” their  content, while they are laying off writers and wondering while circulation drops.

Hat tip: Chase Ingersoll.

This entry was posted on March 10, 2009 at 2:59 am and is filed under On the Media . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed Both comments and pings are currently closed.