Peoria Pundit

The guy who runs Chi-Town Daily News — an all online news site — is causing a mini-sensation with his assertion that with as little as $2 million a year, his site could create a newsroom that could replace the Chicago Tribune and the Chicago Sun-Times. I’m not going  to argue with his numbers,* but I agree with his premise.

I’ve been saying this for years.

Online distribution of the news is vastly more efficient, more user friendly and far less expensive than newspapers. The value in a newspaper is NOT that is printed on paper. It’s value is in the news itself. But the companies that own newspapers base their profits on the fact that it costs too much money for anyone to compete with them. Then the Internet came along and buggy-whipped that business model. Now, newspapers are tossing all their content online for free, thus making it hard for anyone else to come along and compete with online start-ups that are funded with small subscription fees.

* Actually, I think the guy is kidding himself if his thinks the costs of lawyers, accounts, etc. is going to be negligible. And he may not be spending money on a staff that sells ads, but public radio and television DO have employees devoted to doing nothing but talking people and organizations out of their nickles and dimes. And some of their support comes from taxpayers.

A buddy and I sat down once and jotted down on a napkin how much we estimated it would cost per year to operate a for-profit online news organization with two full-timers and a handful of part-timers and interns. It was close to $100,000 as I recall. Meanwhile, a handful of citizen journalists in Peoria is doing a halfway decent job watching the watchers already.

I wasn’t all that enthused when I first heard of The Printed Blog. Now, I am sure of it.

Printed on eight, thick, glossy, white pages, each one about two-thirds the size of a broadsheet newspaper page, it is a substantial physical artifact. It seems so expensively assembled, I can imagine deciding not to pick one up because it really should go to someone with enough time to do it justice.

More important, describing the content as a hodgepodge is charitable. There are good pieces (”It’s Time To Shut Up About Cupcakes”), bad pieces (”Pugslee Atomz Keeps It Real”) and a lot of so-so pieces. But what’s missing is much sense of a guiding sensibility, unless you tally up the four sex articles, including the front-page one on a man whose wife wants to be tied up, etc.

Beyond that, posts on politics, blogging tips, music writing, security advice and sports help fill the pages in a layout resembling the wide-column, one-post-atop-another design of standard blogging tools.

Seriously, people. The goal is supposed to be to cure readers of their addiction to words on printed paper and onto the more efficient means of information distribution, the Internet. Taking stuff from the Internet where it originally appeared and running it unedited on paper seems a step backwards.

I told you that I wouldn’t be having much time for blogging. But I am reading the blogs, and two recent posts stand out.

C.J. Summers is writing about how District 150 just might be violating desegregation laws by redrawing school boundaries.

And Merle Widmer lays out all the facts about the Caterpillar/Museum Square tax hike.

While I have been fiddling around with Blog Peoria to make is easier for citizen journalists to use, C.J. has been committing some great citizen journalism. He’s blogging the Hell out of District 150 these days, with posts here, here, here and here.

I am reading NONE of these things in the Peoria Journal Star, a newspaper that was once — and very recently, too — worthy of respect. No one would mistake if for the New York Times, but it was better than many papers of its size and circulation. Now, it’s like they are trying to shed pages. I picked up a copy the other day and was astonished at how skinny it was.

The mainstream media is collapsing under its own weight. At one time, most newspapers and broadcasters were locally owned. Today, most are owned by corporations that would rather overpay executives who are experts in outsourcing and downsizing than pay people to actually cover the news. That model is failing all over this country. GateHouse Media, owner of the Journal Star and almost every newspaper in this part of the state, is one of them. As B.J. Stone often points out, so is Regent Communications, owner of many local radio stations.

Fine. Let them die. People will still need news, and entrepreneurs will find a way to make money fulfilling that need. The new model is for small online start ups. Some of them are trying a non-for-profit model. For others, a for-profit model is the best fit.

But as the media changes, so should the rules that the operate under. And that’s good. The public is dissatisfied with the news as practiced by the mainstream media. They find it shallow and sensational, and consider claims to be unbias to be dishonest. Robert Niles at the Online Journalism Review has suggested new rules that will be a better fit as news gathering moved away from the media conglomerate model to the online blogger/citizen journalist model:

• Old rule: You can’t cover something in which you are personally involved.
  New rule: Tell your readers how you are involved and how that’s shaped your reporting.
• Old rule: You must present all sides of a story, being fair to each.
  New rule: Report the truth and debunk the lies.
• Old rule: There must be a wall between advertising and editorial.
  New rule: Sell ads into ad space and report news in editorial space. And make sure to show the reader the difference.

THIS is more honest, and certainly more workable when you have single blogger/citizen journalists out there doing original reporting and trying to make a living at it. And lets face it, the contribution a part-time journalist can make is limited. To do it right , you’ve got to do it full time. That means citizen news organizations have to spend some time selling ads and les time trying to maintain the fiction they don’t have a point of view.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. The public doesn’t really care about objectivity. What they want is fairness. They know that newspapers are affected by the need to sell ads, They know that reporters have opinions and those opinions inevitably MUST creep their way into their reporting. They know when someone is telling a reporter a bald faced lie or is spinning the facts. What they want is for reporters to be honest with them about these things.

These opposed rules work better. But the MSM won’t adopt them because that’s not how corporations do it.

Hat top: Poynter’s Romenesko.

The Schaumberg Freedom Coalition explains itself:

The Schaumburg Freedom Coalition is a group of concerned citizens who are keeping tabs on the government of the Village of Schaumburg to ensure that the people’s rights are protected from overreaching government. We focus on issues such as corporate welfare, tax policy, government transparency and eminent domain abuse.

And their “blog” is organized like a news organization Website. And the reporting on freedom-related issues is top notch, including this piece that provides evidence against the benefits of stop-light cameras.

And kudos to PioneerLocal.com’s Blog Buzz for alerting me to this new site. Amazing … a newspaper Website that routinely informs readers of new and interesting citizen journalism.

Cross posted to The American Guesser.

I am not someone who thinks all police officers are perfect. I am quite capable of laying on the criticism when warranted.

But generally speaking, I think police officers have a difficult job and are worthy of respect.

We’ve seen this in Peoria, too. A police officer is involved in a shooting, and almost immediately, the media is flooded with comments about how the police MUST be lying because the victim is known in the community as a wonderful person who would never hurt a fly.

That’s what happened in Chicago recently: A 16-year-old boy was shot and killed by police responding to a call about a man with a gun. The article contains the following paragraphs:

“He was a good kid . . . he just needed a little guidance,” Arnold said. “He fell behind the wrong crowd and he just did some wrong things. But we all make mistakes, and he didn’t deserve for the Chicago police to take his life. He didn’t deserve it . . . he was just a regular kid.”

Arnold drove to the scene of the shooting on Saturday to see it for himself.

Although police said they found a gun nearby, Arnold said Winford was not known to carry a weapon.

And it might have been left there, without rebuttal, because police and prosecutors often keep details to themselves because of a fear or creating too much pre-trial publicity.

But enter the blog Second City Cop. Commenters pointed to a photographs on the Internet of the “regular kid” who was “not known to carry a weapon.” In the three photos, he’s shows holding what appear to be four different firearms, In one, it looks to me like he might be making a gang sign. In one of the images, he’s wearing a SpongeBob Squarepants shirt.

And this illustrates a point I try to make about blog commenters. Citizen Journalism is about more than ordinary folks creating blogs and writing about the stuff that the mainstream media misses or ignores, for whatever reason. It’s about the commenters. The people who read blogs and add their own information and insight ALSO are practicing citizen journalism.

Journalism isn’t owned by those who have a degree in journalism, or who work for a publisher. Nor is it those who own their own domain name. A journalist is anyone who practices journalism.

We are living in the world of grass-roots media now, folks. It’s not top-down anymore.