Cup of Joe Powell
"It's like some French Foreign Legion outpost up there," says Colin McEnroe, a former capitol correspondent who who was recently fired from his job hosting a daily radio talk show and writes a weekly column for the Courant. "Everyone around you is dead and you've got six bullets left and 20 people running at you."
That's from an article at Governing.com detailing the decline of reporting and news coverage of state legislatures, the continuing poor health of the newspaper business and the search for a new business model for news.
What role will the news biz take in the next decade? What does the public need and use from reporting?
Reporters have been poorly paid historically, and bloggers do much with zero pay, so is all profitability from reporting and publishing about to disappear? Will we see a rise in regional newspapers or perhaps more locally published weekly papers?
The argumentative he said/she said blather unrolling across cable news networks plays like verbal wrestling matches and may draw ratings, but does it actually supply information or simply entertainment?
Maybe newspapers should adopt the old stringer method and start paying, even small amounts, to those who attend, blog and report events at the local and state level.
Michael Hirschorhn writes on the potential demise of the NYTimes and the possible future of news reporting for the Atlantic and says:
"As David Remnick, the editor of The New Yorker, pointed out at a recent media breakfast, the blogging and local reporting from Mumbai in the early hours of the November terrorist attacks were nothing short of remarkable. Ditto in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina ...
1 comment:
Just thinking out loud. Is "news" something that should be sold? Shouldn't news be something that is free for all to consume. Coverage and making a profit are two separate discussions, no? How many reporters would be enough to cover the State Capitol.
Is the news biz immune from the general rules of business?
My point? If we believe that covering our government is important and newspapers, TV and radio have lost interest because those media forms no longer see economic value in covering local politics, what's left to do?
Me think those that care most about local politics-- the reporters who cover the beat -- need to be thinking like entrepreneurs and figure out ways to profit from what they do. I'm betting that those journalists that provide the best coverage will prosper financially.
It's time to stop asking media entities to support news coverage they no longer care about.
Again, these are just random ramblings from a "former" CT political reporter.
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