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April 21, 2005
Chris Nolan: The Stand Alone Journalist is Here......And the newsroom has left the building. "If the folks in the building want to insist that what they do has some sort of magical quality, well, today's stand alone journalists have an even better chance of becoming the next generation's most trusted names--plural--in news."Guest writer Chris Nolan, the accomplished journalist and opinionated author of Politics From Left to Right, coined the term “stand alone journalist” to refer to the self-sufficiency of the individual provider, made plausible by the Web. The first time I heard her use this term (at BloggerCon III in Palo Alto) I thought: That’s good coinage. She had found a spot between “blogging” as a trend in authorship and the press as we’ve always known it: here’s where you two are going to converge, said she. Of course, Nolan was also trying to describe the kind of journalist she could feel herself becoming as Politics from Left to Right developed and the Web expansion wore on. (Her column in e-week.) There have always been freelancers and journalists who worked on their own, but one of the headaches they shared was not owning the means of production and distribution. As Nolan says, “We have our own printing press” (the nifty modern weblog) and “RSS gives us our own delivery trucks or satellite feeds.” A stand alone journalist is able to reach users directly, but also through bigger media sites that draw off the energy of many contributors. Nolan thinks a mixed future is likely, where you can go into the journalism business for yourself, sometimes contracting with media agencies, sometimes syndicating your work, sometimes publishing it at your own address (like www.chrisnolan.com, an effective platform for Nolan’s brand of snappy, intelligent, point-of-view journalism). Now the stand alone model is not just an idea. The outlines of it are coming into view. The best example so far is widely known: Josh Marshall, a journalist with a stand alone operation called Talking Points Memo, supported by contributions and ads. (On Marshall’s fascination with open source journalism see my recent post Are You Ready for a Brand New Beat? which also profiles other stand alone journalists. ) In blogging years, Josh Marshall is old. There are some new developments. For instance, there’s this offer, now running from GetLocalNews.com NEW: To get paid for your Citizen Journalism articles, go to any GetLocalNews.com-AFreePress.com site and create a Readers Write account or update an existing profile to receive payments. The Readers Write login pages have more information about the article payment program. (Also see this announcement.) Then there’s this contest in video, announced recently: As we move closer to our launch this summer, we want you to help us create content for Current TV. There are three different video themes our production team is working on now. We’d love to see your take. The deadline for submissions is May 12. We will accept all submissions up to five minutes. We’ll post the top 5 and you decide who wins. The winner will get a Studio development deal of $3,000 to pitch and produce three 3-5 minute pieces that will air on Current. As I said, it’s just the outlines. As with this system: NowPublic News is built on stories that people demand. By creating an assignment or voting on assignments you think are important, you help make the news. Here are the most recent assignments… And see Metafilter too, with more links. Special to PressThink The Stand Alone Journalist is Here By Chris Nolan A few days ago, when Jay Rosen wrote and asked if I was going to do any more posts defining “stand alone journalism,” the phrase I coined to describe the work I do at my site, Politics From Left to Right, I demurred. My readers are interested in my West Coast view of politics and its intersection with technology, my feminist rants or my theories about Progress libertarians. As for the nuts and bolts of the news business as we practitioners see it, they’re not interested. Jay’s response was perfectly reasonable: Mine are. So, here I am, spurred on by Rupert Murdoch’s speech to the American Society of Newspaper Editors. I don’t care for his politics but I deeply respect his news and business judgment (I’ve been inside The New York Post and they were good to me). And I’m impressed but not surprised that Murdoch has the nerve to tell American newspaper editors something they badly needed to hear. The newsroom has left the building. Readers—and not just the young, whom Murdoch emphasized—gather their own information and parse it out as they see fit. And they find it insulting that anyone would tell them what to think about issues or events as they occur. The Sheltered Newspaper Editor Now, it should not have been necessary for Rupert Murdoch to give this speech. But editors, particularly those running regional newspapers in cities and counties across the country—the dominant, if not the monopoly news outlets in their local markets—lead cloistered lives. They are the same folks who once declared that newspapers would always be around because you could “read them in the can.” They think “bloggers” are interesting but are pretty sure they don’t have any in their communities. The few who have recently come to the idea that on-line writing has value seem to have decided that I wish I were exaggerating about the cloistering and ignorance at work in the news business. The day after Murdoch’s speech, some smarty-parts put a picture of Craig Newmark up at ASNE. Although his photo appears on page 80 of last week’s Time (one of the world’s “most influential people”) only a few editors recognized the man who—with a staff of 14 and a lot of computers — ate the San Francisco Chronicle’s ad business. Even more startling: Only a few in the room had ever heard of his phenomenally successful CraigsList, the free on-line classified site that exists in every major U.S. city. It’s worse than you think. About a year ago, I did a brief piece for Fortune about Craigslist and estimated it had annual gross revenues of between $7 million and $10 million. A profile done a few weeks later in the Los Angeles Times mocked my estimates. To do that sort of business, the writer said, Craigslist would have to carry 93,000 employment ads (for which it charges a modest $75 a week) a year. Well, if you go to the site and count a week’s worth of ad postings—as the LA Times reporter should have done—you’ll see that Craigslist is booking hundreds of ads every day. And they’re not classified. They’re the more lucrative employment display ads that newspapers treasure. That’s why the San Francisco Chronicle and the San Jose Mercury News are hurting. The free classifieds at Craigslist give people just one more excuse not to turn to their paper. But, as the company’s CEO Jim Buckmaster pointed out this week, that’s not the only reason readers aren’t reading the paper anymore. What’s this got to do with stand alone journalism? Plenty. First, it’s a snapshot of the underlying economics, the way news editors have ignored changes in how their work and their payrolls are supported. How can any daily newspaper editor call himself a newshound when he or she isn’t aware of a seismic change in the classified ad business, once the bedrock of a paper’s service to readers? This willful ignorance is a great example of newspaper editors remaining, as Murdoch said, out of touch with the world around them. It’s one of the many reasons why stand alone journalists have followed the news and left the building. It’s also why many talented writers and reporters are choosing to strike out on the web instead of getting newsroom jobs. Not that there are that many jobs to be had, of course. Defining the Stand Alones These are not bloggers. They are people who are using blogging technology—software that allows them to quickly publish their work and broadcast it on the Internet—to find and attract users. They understand that the barrier to entry in this new business isn’t getting published; anyone can do that. The barrier to entry is finding an audience. That’s why their editorial product is consistent, reliable and known. Readers have expectations and stand alone journalists understand this and put that understanding into practice. So what—exactly—is a stand alone journalist? That’s a definition that’s going to vary with the person, of course, just as no group or reporters can really agree on what makes a “journalist.” For me, the stand alone journalist succeeds in getting stories told in an honest and forthright manner without benefit of working for a larger news outlet. That doesn’t mean they’re objective or impartial; it means they’re honest about their points of view or assumptions. A stand alone journalist understands that the main job is to inform readers; and the ethics that salaried journalists have when it comes to fairness, accuracy and honesty aren’t just phrases. They’re a discipline for doing the work that needs to be done: getting your facts right, your assumptions validated, your arguments well grounded. The result is as varied as the individuals at the keyboard. Joshua Micah Marshall’s Talking Points Memo is a great example of this phenomenon for serious political junkies. But so is Roxanne Cooper whose “write your own caption” posts bring a standing newsroom joke to a whole new audience. These writers employ the same standards that newspaper people use to crank out their stories. Their style, however, is different. It’s more personable. It shares. It doesn’t hesitate to refer to other writers, even those in competition, to make a point, raise a question, to clarify a thought or idea. This is not news writing as we know it but it is informative and useful and it counts on the reader to participate, to argue and discuss. It believes in competition and different points of view; it’s flexible and open to reader comment and criticism. It can adapt easily. And people—thousands of them visiting these sites every day—love the more open style, in the same way they used to love their daily paper. The audience is growing every day. A technology called RSS—really simple syndication—makes distribution easy, too. We have our own printing press, RSS gives us our own delivery trucks or satellite feeds. How It Might Work Stand alone journalists are the next iteration of on-line news professionals. They stand alone because they aren’t salaried by existing news outlets. They aren’t part of an institution but seek to become one. They may be freelancers—many are—but the work they do on the web isn’t under contract for a larger entity. Right now, they are working for themselves by themselves or with other like-minded souls. Oh, and this won’t be limited to print, or I should say, type. The Internet can carry anything digital as long as it can ride the TCP/IP protocols that allow computer to talk to each other. Radio reporters will podcast their shows. TV reporters will V-for video-cast their work. I don’t know if stand alone journalists will replace traditional news outlets entirely. They’re more likely to supplement the work of cash-strapped established news outlets. The New York Times isn’t going to give up its dominance of national or international news coverage. Nor should it. But its editors could start taking website posts—as they are written on the sites—from stand alone journalists as part of its news packages, for on-line and print. Enterprising niche sites, iVillage, for instance, might feature the regular writing of a stay-at-home mother. She’ll post to her own site and iVillage will take her posts as a centerpiece for discussion and comments by a larger audience she might not normally reach. IVillage will pay her (or her syndication service) for her posts which may well come at odd times and weird hours when she—like her audience—gets a rare chance to sit and think. Some of these writers might already have posted their stuff on-line when the editor IMs—sends an instant message—or calls. Some might be assigned pieces, some may call the paper and pitch a story idea. Others might offer their work via special RSS feeds to clients in newsrooms and around the ‘net. They’ll offer stories but they’ll also offer a new skill. As conversations about the news become and accepted part of interpreting events, everyone is going to need editorial talent that can happily engage in debate or moderate an on-line discussion group. This is the unique mix that stand alone journalists will bring to their business. Because they are growing up outside the newsroom, they can be inside the attitudes readers have always had toward the high church of news. Why will all this happen? Because there aren’t enough people (and there aren’t enough talented people) inside news organizations today. It’s bad now. It’s going to get worse. Payrolls, cut to the bone in many papers, are going to shrink even more as ad revenue falls as circulation hits new lows. Newspaper owners decided long ago that they were going to push down costs by cutting staff. As Craiglist’s Buckmaster has pointed out, they have destroyed their product—reporting and writing. But smart writers and reporters haven’t forgotten how it’s done; and they will sell their skills to news outlets, lots and lots of news outlets, maybe even to individual readers. The critic Terry Teachout, another stand alone journalist, has this to say about the current state of journalism. He, too, was deeply impressed with Murdoch’s speech. I‚ve said this before, but it can’t be said often enough: the mainstream media aren’t especially interested in serious art, and such interest as they do have is diminishing daily. If you’re looking to big-city newspapers to start reviewing more literary fiction, or to PBS to telecast more ballet and modern dance, or to your local radio station to continue carrying the Metropolitan Opera’s Saturday broadcasts, you’re kidding yourself. They don’t care. Which leaves you with two options. You can sit around complaining about their indifference, or you can do an end run around them and use the new media to reach out directly to your audience, both existing and potential. Teachout’s talking to artists. But he could easily be talking to any writer and reporter interested in covering—but seriously covering— the arts. The problems are the same, the solutions similar: Leave the building. Go off on your own. Stand alone journalists will carry the desire for good, well-written journalism beyond the economic reality of newsrooms today. Where will they end up? Anywhere they’re wanted. And they will be wanted in many, many places because readers aren’t going to be tied to one news outlet, that paper that lands on the doorstep every morning or the 6 p.m. evening news cast. They’re going to wander around the web, looking for things they find interesting. Or they’re going to wander around the world looking for interesting things to put on the web. It’s unlikely that stand alone journalists will concentrate on who-what-when-where of breaking news. That’s a free service now for almost everyone; or it’s the result of being able—like the New York Times— to throw bodies at big stories. It’s What You Have to Say But I do think some of the best stand alone journalists will be our next generation of investigative reporters, following their noses where the story goes, supporting themselves with daily work on their sites while piecing together the big stories. This, too, is economics. Only the big, big papers—all three of them—are willing to spend the money on experienced reporters, often those best qualified to write and report long-term projects or complicated stories. Stand alone journalists will also provide what we now label feature and opinion writing for large on-line sites like Yahoo, which are going to need to mix up their offerings to keep readers beyond their emphasis on breaking news. As we’ve seen, news is easy. But it’s hard to find a thoughtful voice who can gather herself in a timely manner, do the research and make the phone call that leads to an insight no one’s had. Yahoo and its competitors—who have built a news site but certainly don’t want to build newsrooms—will be better served by adding those writers. As we all know, all news and no color makes for a dull, dull read. That’s also why the things we call now newspapers are going to need a similar sort of feature and opinion writing on their web and paper pages. It’s going to be writing—and writing well, not news gathering—that sets them apart. Newspapers will need folks who can turn a phrase or hold forth on an area of expertise; and they’ll rely on stand-alone journalists to fill in the gaps in their staffing, to write that color story, craft the profile, interpret the news. Like their newsroom counterparts who don’t spend a lot of time worrying about the state of the press that puts their words on paper, stand alone journalist are going to use technology to do their work instead of letting technology dominate the way they do their work. Much of what’s called blogging is, I’m afraid, a stress on the widgets and gizmos, not on content and context. In journalism, it’s not how you say it, it’s what you have to say. Stand alone’ers, the good ones, will acquire even more of the credibility and authority automatically afforded their salaried counterparts. How long will this equal standing take? “The secret’s out,” wrote Jon Carroll of the San Francisco Chronicle. “The stand-alone journalists are here, and they are digging out facts and leading crusades. They are also printing gossip and distorting facts — but hey, so are we.” If editors and publishers take off their blinkers and stop doing focus groups and market tests and instead listen—really pay attention to what readers are saying and doing—things will change more quickly. If the folks in the building want to insist that what they do has some sort of magical quality, well, today’s stand alone journalists have an even better chance of becoming the next generation’s most trusted names—plural—in news. After Matter: Notes, reactions & links… “So, fuck it. I quit.” Writer, Thinker, Big Name blogger David Weinberger Stands Alone at MSNBC. He had been appearing on-air in a special segment for bloggers… I just couldn’t face implicitly confirming the idea that the blogosphere consists of big voices arguing with one another — spit fights! — instead of 10 million real voices engaged in every variety of human conversation and delight. Austin Bay responds to this post: Ben Franklin called himself a printer, but he was also a writer and editor. Now the Internet and blogware allow a writer-editor-publisher to reach a global audience and do so cheaply. Moreover, the talented writer-editor-publisher can circumvent the political hierarchy of the news organization. The game of “who you know” remains in play—- but demonstrating “who you can reach” via the Internet has made the political gamesmanship of “the news business” or “the publishing business” less determinative. Bay’s sketch suggests that writers who are largely self-published, in business for themselves, will drop in and out of journalism, in a pattern eluding the old hierarchy, which produced the kind of career path described by Adelle Waldman: Being a reporter typically means moving from city to city, smaller paper to bigger paper, as you work your way up from the Smalltown Weekly to a major metropolitan daily. It’s the journalism equivalent of a doctor’s residency after medical school — you are simultaneously learning the skills you need to hone your craft and paying your dues. Austin Bay’s point is there are different ways of paying your dues. “Demonstrating who you can reach via the Internet” is one way of disrupting the hierarchy that sets the rules. Chris Nolan explains why we needed a term like stand alone journalist. From It’s not just blogging any more (June 22, 2004): For a while I, and many others have been dissatisfied with the term “web logging.” That focuses on the technology, not on what the technology produces. So, after a little thought, I’m calling what I and others do Stand-Alone Journalism. Why Stand-Alone Journalism? Well, it’s accurate. A journalist – or a small group of reporters – can work on the web to produce what they want as they find it appropriate. And readers are equally free to read the work of individual journalist as they see fit, on their time, not on schedules set by TV networks or the newspapers. Dan Gillmor: “It’s a catchy phrase, but an incomplete one. Even the best solo blogger doesn’t stand truly alone. We are all building on each others’ work, and learning from each other and our communities. The stand-alone journalist who misses this — and Chris certainly gets it — will not be standing long.” Gillmor’s edit: ‘Stand-Alone’ Journalism in a Connected Age. Look what happens when stand alone book critcs stand together. “Book club for blogging world.” Classy debut for BusinessWeek’s new blogging venture. They took their time, faced the learning curve, and did it right. Blogspotting: Where the worlds of business, media and blogs collide. Bares watching. Welcome, Stephen Baker and Heather Green. Plus: the cover story: Blogs Will Change Your Business. Paul Conley says it’s happening already in the trade press: “These new ‘stand alone’ journalists are most likely to come from the specialized business press, where customers will pay high rates for quality information… traditional B2B publishers need to be aware of the competitive threat posed by their readers. Thousands of people in the B2B audience already have the tools to launch a competitive product — expertise, sources and publishing software.” Ethan Zuckerman: Is Christian Science Monitor the World’s Bloggiest Newspaper? Highly recommended for the newspaper geek in all of us. Phil Boas, deputy editorial page editor at The Arizona Republic, seems ready for the stand alone era. From The Masthead, magazine of the editorial writers association. (Via Powerline.) …When you no longer need the millions of dollars in capital, the multi-million dollar press, the network of delivery people fanning out across the land, to start a newspaper, the door opens to competition. Very similar to Chris Nolan’s vision. Meanwhile, Ed Morrissey of Captain’s Quarters responds to Nolan (April 21, 2005): Perhaps the better way to create distinctions isn’t by labelling the blog or the blogger but the post or the thread. There are times when I perform stand-alone journalism; other times, I’m a self-published pundit; the small amount left amounts to a very poorly secured diary. The revolution in newsroom thinking won’t be an acknowledgement that a handful of bloggers are stand-alone journalists. It will come when people finally realize that all bloggers can be stand-alone journalists if and when they choose to be. Silicon Valley Watcher (Sep. 20, 2004): Mike Magee—successful “stand alone journalist.” Joe Gandelman says for all the hot air about citizen journalists, most bloggers are “citizen op ed,” which is no revolution, even though it is fun for all involved. Then he asks why don’t we see more interviews like this one from The Talking Dog. It adds original information. But it’s rare. Gandlesman wants to know: is blogging living up to its potential? See the discussion in his comments too. Bloggers are pretty good at this, though. Jeff Jarvis posts his links on citizen journalism for the presentation he made to the Radio & Television News Directors Association meeting in Vegas. Helpful if you are new to the subject. In Bloggers vs. Journalists is Over (Jan. 15, 2005), I described one reason to bet on the stand alones. Here is one advantage bloggers have in the struggle for reputation— for the user’s trust. They are closer to the transaction where trust gets built up on the Web. There’s a big difference between tapping a built-up asset, like the St. Pete Times “brand,” and creating it from scratch. Bloggers are “building their reputations from the ground up,” as Hiler said, and to do this they have to focus on users. They have to be in dialogue. They have to point to others and say: listen to him! The connection between what they do and whether they are trusted is much alive and apparent. In journalism that connection has been harder to find lately. Journalists don’t know much about it. Steve Rubel at Micropersuasion (June 23, 2004): “In my view, a stand-alone journalist is exactly what it says - someone who has quit writing professionally for an established media outlet to earn their living almost exclusively from blogging/personal journalism via ads and subscription. Rafat Ali at PaidContent.org is the perfect example of a stand-alone journalist. Robert Scoble is not.” I just came across this fantastic bibliography of major articles online about weblogs and blogging, put together by Kairos News. It includes articles back to 1999. Clay Shirky from ‘02, Weblogs and the Mass Amateurization of Publishing (Oct. 3, 2002). A lot of people in the weblog world are asking “How can we make money doing this?” The answer is that most of us can’t. Weblogs are not a new kind of publishing that requires a new system of financial reward. Instead, weblogs mark a radical break. They are such an efficient tool for distributing the written word that they make publishing a financially worthless activity. It’s intuitively appealing to believe that by making the connection between writer and reader more direct, weblogs will improve the environment for direct payments as well, but the opposite is true. By removing the barriers to publishing, weblogs ensure that the few people who earn anything from their weblogs will make their money indirectly. The Difficult Life of David Shaw Cathy Seipp, in her “From the Left Coast” column, has a suggestion for the wizards at the Los Angeles Times. It concerns media writer David Shaw, with whom PressThink has occasional business. “I don’t know why the Times doesn’t just retire Shaw from his bland, fakely objective phoning-it-in media critic’s beat and let him expand the food column — in which he compellingly reveals the various pet peeves and recurring annoyances that vex his remarkably soft life — into a full-time wallow.” The article suggests that Shaw was supposed to turn into some kind of “ideas correspondent” but didn’t get the memo that media wasn’t really his beat.
Posted by Jay Rosen at April 21, 2005 1:12 AM
Comments
Should the term "stand alone journalism" relate something more than just the independence aspect? I applaud the term in that it separates the recreational blogger from a journalist, and yet there is no reference to it's digital quality? Posted by: anorpheus at April 21, 2005 5:50 AM | Permalink First, wow! That's a great piece. Second, a question for Chris: I notice that you refer to the audience of the stand-alone journalist as 'users' rather than 'customers'. I like that usage--why did you choose it? But this still looks like we're limiting the definition of "journalist" to "opinion writer" or "first-person feature writer." That's an awfully small segment of the media. There can be a value in intelligent analysis of news, and blogging is a neat tool for doing that. But where is the "news" going to come from if the press withers under the assaults of Craigslist and bloggers? Here's an experiment -- pick up a handful of newspapers of varying sizes and scan the stories. You will find many stories that could not have been done -- at least not with any sort of efficiency -- by bloggers. The reason we wound up with monopoly newspapers in the first place is because market forces dictated that this sort of work could only be done with an economy of scale. Even if you remove the printing press (unlikely, since any enterprising newspaper also has printing contracts with several community publications), you still need a fair amount of capital to do the most difficult work in journalism. And you still need a brand name to get your phone calls answered. Why have we forgotten this? Posted by: Beau at April 21, 2005 8:55 AM | Permalink Come to think of it, I have another question. How would you compare what you've said about the relationship of the stand-alone journalist to institutional journalism to what Camile Paglia said in Salon about adjuncts and the academy: On the Internet everyone has a voice and anyone can listen. We've forgotten nothing, Beau. When everyone has an Internet enabled mobile phone that is also a camera and recorder, then anyone and everyone can be an on-the-spot reporter. As for all the "training" that journalists supposedly get -- it amounts to nothing of value. Their product speaks for itself. Any literate person can do as good a job of basic factual reporting as a trained journalist. Probably better, since an amateur will lack the seen-it-all arrogance of the journo. There is nothing the media can do now that the Internet-enabled citizen will not be able to do faster and better. Posted by: Evil Pundit at April 21, 2005 9:41 AM | Permalink Evil Pundit, how would the Internet-enabled citizen have broken the Watergate story? Evil -- The "training" isn't the hang-up. I don't doubt that a lot of bloggers could step into a local newsroom, get a quick tour of the benefits plan and the publishing system, and fare just fine. It's the economics. It's the vetting process of editing. It's the teamwork. It's the accountability -- yes, I still insist that a publication that answers to readers and stockholders has more checks on it than a blog whose comments can be filled with the echoes of like-minded enablers. There's also this to consider -- to be an amateur reporter with a bunch of gadgets, you have to have a fair amount of money and free time. Those who can't afford to spend the bucks or the time will be left out. Is that really more democratic? Finally -- do you honestly think "an amateur will lack the seen-it-all arrogance of the journo"? Bloggers aren't arrogant? And meet some more journalists -- we aren't all jaded beyond repair. Just those of us who are aging. Posted by: Beau at April 21, 2005 10:19 AM | Permalink Good stuff. I would only add that the independent journalist of tomorrow will be multimedia skilled. We can no longer separate print from visual, for the Web demands (and facilitates) both. Specialization will come via niche, not skill, and this is the real challenge to our universities. Posted by: Terry Heaton at April 21, 2005 10:51 AM | Permalink It's the accountability -- yes, I still insist that a publication that answers to readers and stockholders has more checks on it than a blog whose comments can be filled with the echoes of like-minded enablers. The word "can" is what makes this sentence useless, since they "can" also be filled with rabid (if not near-psychotic) opponents. But anyway, my actual point is to ask why you confliate "readers and stockholders" here as if they are both something than a newspaper has but a blogger (or stand-alone journalist) does not. I have no stockholders, but I most certainly have readers. In fact, I have readers who "can" show up in the comments as they see fit, instantly, and say whatever they want. That's more direct, instant, and uncensored accountability from readers than newspapers have, Posted by: The One True b!X Wow. Thanks for all the comments, compliments and questions. Let me try to respond. This is roughly the order I'm reading. I used the word "users" without any sort of deliberation and it's probably a hang-over from my years covering Silicon Valley where folks who use computers do just that. One point is worth emphasizing here: We are early. I think there will be as many stand alone journalists as there are ways to approach the job and ways to use any and all forms of technology. So I think discussions about who can do what are somewhat premature; we don't know. This is my version of where we're headed but the path isn't going to be straight, the way isn't going to be certain. As for writing and reporting: For the most part, I think folks who start down the path I've outlined here will have some experience and training. Speed is important in and out of the newsroom. Some people can and do think quickly and make good news judgments with little experience. Many don't. Training – experience – makes it easier. Posted by: Chris Nolan at April 21, 2005 12:05 PM | Permalink Chris, it may have been simply automatic usage, but I appreciated it. When people describe me as a news 'consumer' or a news 'customer', I tend to reach for my copy of Revolver to calm down a little. Chris: Great article. I suspect that this is indeed the way journalism might be headed (whether it SHOULD be or not, cf. Beau, is a whole 'nother question I am not touching for now), and we're doing so much wandering around in the dark with our project that it's a relief, if not a joy, to stumble across something like this piece, which credibly suggests to me that we might be on the right track after all. And, Terry, your point informs exactly what we're doing. One of the first things I did was pull together a list of what equipment it would take to fully equip one standalone multimedia reporter. We're building from there. Lex -- If your project works, you'll be aggregating the reporting work of local citizens. That'll be great stuff. But I'd argue that each citizen's blog will be made stronger by the fact that it's under the same umbrella as other reporters and editors, professional and semi-pro. To me, that's an argument against the stand-alone journalist. I can see stand-alones in niches that would otherwise defy aggregation -- say, the chess blog that I read. We've already seen that stand-alone punditry is feasible. But if your project works, it should prove that there's value to being something other than a lone voice in the wilderness. Posted by: Beau at April 21, 2005 5:13 PM | Permalink Beau, I've been an advocate of the DIY approach -- Do It Yourself -- since the punk-rock movement. I don't think it's a necessity in our particular case, but because I might be wrong, I want at least a small cadre of journalists -- first, here in-house; then among our readership -- trained and equipped to function as standalones if need be, as soon as possible. Does scale matter to this? A lot of things covered by metro, regional, and local press aren't going to sustain or generate the kind of audience that will produce the revenue to feed and clothe a "stand alone" journalist. You could say that those things will cease to be news in the blog-o-press, but that seems like a bad thing for our political system. Or should only the self-motivated (and independently employed) report on city council in the future? Posted by: John at April 21, 2005 5:32 PM | Permalink A lot of things covered by metro, regional, and local press aren't going to sustain or generate the kind of audience that will produce the revenue to feed and clothe a "stand alone" journalist. That scale issue is a major problem that I don't believe has sorted itself out yet. I keep getting close to approaches that will work, but haven't yet gotten there, and I've been working at precisely that local level for a little over two years now. Posted by: The One True b!X To me the stand alone journalist is like a mental step. In practice, everything is different, but you're prepared if you've taken clear steps in your mind first. Obviously stand alone journalists are better off in networks of some kind. Loose or strong? Place-based or interest driven? Nonprofit or commercial? We don't know. Let people go out and try stuff. Then we'll know. A successful network of stand alone journalists who benefit from their connections to each other and from the scale on which their efforts are organized... right, we're not there yet. But the mental steps we took to put that picture together are probably sound. Conceiving of a stand alone journalist is a necessary step in seeing a network like that emerge into sustainability. Stand Alone Journalist has a "sprung from cages" feel. It's liberation language --for a phase in the de-industrialization of news. As far as local coverage goes, the little free advertiser with local coverage is the only dead-tree paper that gets read in our house. It may have ten pages of real-estate ads, but it does have good coverage of school-board meetings, city council goings-on, and the occasional juicy story of corruption in high places. It apparently makes money (it has faithfully come once a week for six years) and is locally owned. It doesn't bother with anything but city news, rightly figuring that everyone in Silicon Valley reads Yahoo, Google, NYT Online, or SFGate for anything that isn't local. My own guess is that dead-tree papers will become _very_ local and will abandon attempts at being one-stop-shops for news. Posted by: Foobarista at April 22, 2005 2:27 AM | Permalink Something to consider ... the stand alone journalist model may be prototyped here but find roots elsewhere. Perhaps in an economy where the economics are more amenable, people are more (wireless) "wired", but still written in English to maximize international readership? Korea? India? "Stand alone" journalist. Oh, that's what I've been for the past couple of years. Guess I need to change my business cards. Does that come with any more respect? Posted by: Gordon Joseloff at April 22, 2005 3:12 AM | Permalink Folks want facts (like unbiased Wikki?/ reliable facts), and reasonable opinion/ speculation about the future. Plus guidance about WHICH are the important issues/ important questions to ask. Lots of niches. Yet a real de-certification issue is whether a politicized readership can even agree on the importance of different facts (like the fact that Kerry promised to sign , but has not yet, the you-know-which-Form). Or that it was 30 years that the Khmer Roughe began their genocide, thanks to the success of the anti-War Leftists in America getting the US to leave SE Asia. Lots of stand-alone journalists seem better at predicting than the MSM -- blogs help keep some of the inconvenient facts current. Who do you trust? The very key issue -- you trust who you read. Posted by: Tom Grey - Liberty Dad at April 22, 2005 10:19 AM | Permalink From the view of a local newspaper, What is the difference between a respected "stand alone journalist" and the AP or NYT? If the answer is none, what does that say about the AP or NYT? If the answer is some, what does that say about the AP or NYT? What a wonderful, thoughtful piece. Thanks. Posted by: paul conley at April 22, 2005 2:46 PM | Permalink Paul: Next time do it like this: There's more about this at my blog. 'Stand alone' journalism and the trade press Now you just added value to the thread. Beau: But I'd argue that each citizen's blog will be made stronger by the fact that it's under the same umbrella as other reporters and editors, professional and semi-pro. To me, that's an argument against the stand-alone journalist. Agreed. I worry that the average news consumer will not have the patience to establish a trust relationship amoung a plethora of stand-alone journalists, unless they are packaged under a brand name. Posted by: Fenrisulven at April 23, 2005 12:52 AM | Permalink Agreed. I worry that the average news consumer will not have the patience to establish a trust relationship amoung a plethora of stand-alone journalists, unless they are packaged under a brand name. In some situations, that's how it will play out, in others i won't have to. That sounds trite, but it's important that we stop falling into the trap of, "It's going to be THIS way." Posted by: The One True b!X You're both right. I see a demand for a diversity of media. Not a new dominance by a new form. Now if we can just convince the stockholders that this is a good thing so we'll have capital to invest ... Posted by: Beau at April 23, 2005 8:42 AM | Permalink But how is stand-alone different from vanity press? Current TV's call for amateur video is just public access with better (or not) lighting. Their notion that viewers can't influence content is about 20 years out of date. Bunim-Murray has made a fortune out of viewers who become cast members (case in point: everyone on Real World grew up watching Real World). Posted by: RachelCohen at April 23, 2005 6:07 PM | Permalink But how is stand-alone different from vanity press? How is any published writing different, at its core, from vanity press? No matter the medium, no matter the level of "establishment", publishing ones writing is at least partly an inherent arrogance -- you have some sense, somewhere, that what you have to contribute is worthy of people's attention. The only reason the question is asked of "stand-alone" and not of "established" is because, well, the established press is established, is a known quantity, has existed long enough for it to have an institutional (if bruised) credibility and acceptance. It's all vanity, somewhere inside. Doesn't mean it's worthless. Posted by: The One True b!X |
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