I was perusing an interview/discussion between Tom Teodorczuk of the Guardian newspaper and digital guru Clay Shirky (Thanks for the tip, Boing Boing.), and it got me to thinking about our own local newspaper, the Times-Dispatch. Here's the nugget that set my mind a whirlin':
The great misfortune of newspapers in this era is that they were such a good idea for such a long time that people felt the newspaper business model was part of a deep truth about the world, rather than just the way things happened to be. It's like the fall of communism, where a lot of the eastern European satellite states had an easier time because there were still people alive who remembered life before the Soviet Union - nobody in Russia remembered it. Newspaper people are like Russians, in a way.
Jeff Jarvis said it beautifully: "If you can't imagine anyone linking to what you're about to write, don't write it." The things that the Huffington Post or the Daily Beast have are good storytelling and low costs. Newspapers are going to get more elitist and less elitist. The elitist argument is: "Be the Economist or New Yorker, a small, niche publication that says: 'We're only opening our mouths when what we say is demonstrably superior to anything else on the subject.'" The populist model is: "We're going to take all the news pieces we get and have an enormous amount of commentary. It's whatever readers want to talk about." Finding the working business model between them in that expanded range is the new challenge.
I know most of my friends would reactively argue that the Times-Dispatch would chase Shirky's first model, the elitist, niche approach to news. I suppose if I truly believed that the TD was an elitist institution -- Okay, the TD minus the editorial page staff -- I might be inclined toward a different position. But the journalists and editors I know downtown are genuinely interested in reporting and journalism and going home to see their kids. Sure, they're held hostage in their own curious way by bad habits (see Shirky paragraph one, above) and by a corporate model that hasn't quite realized its dead. But elitist, know-it-alls? Nah.
At any rate, I started mulling over what a rebranded Times-Dispatch might look like. A Times-Dispatch that merged a bunch of open source data gurus, public discussion boards, Public Square events and subject matter experts into a new sort of daily newspaper -- one that was heavy on three things: data, analysis and commentary.
If you're fixated on what the Times-Dispatch has been, you're probably inclined to disbelieve that it is recoverable. But it's funny what desperation and a strong desire not to follow the rest of the lemmings over the cliff will do to a bunch of newspaper guys.
