Read Governing's cover story Blackout: The decline of big-city newspapers

Roundtable: The Return of Local News

These are depressing and difficult times for newspapers. News of layoffs seems to come every week as the business model that once sustained them disintegrates. And as newspapers retrench, both in the size of their newsrooms and in the ground they can cover, the cities they ostensibly serve are left with spotty coverage of local affairs, too many stories that go untold, and a shrinking sense of their own complexity.

Yet oddly enough, this is also a bracing, exciting and even optimistic time for what you might think of as "newspaper journalism." As information migrates to the Web, so, inevitably, have journalists. While the first cohort tended (and still tends) to think in terms of developing blogs, journalists in a small but growing number of cities have seized on the vacuum created by the retrenchment of daily newspapers and started local news sites. They're in their infancy, but they are practicing energetic journalism and redefining what "news coverage" means when applied to a city or town.

Governing's Rob Gurwitt talks here with two pioneers in the field: Paul Bass, who runs the New Haven Independent in New Haven, Connecticut, and Andrew Donohue, one of the co-editors of voiceofsandiego.org in San Diego, California.

Rob Gurwitt: Why does what you're doing on your sites matter in New Haven and San Diego? What do the Independent and the voice bring to those cities?

Paul Bass: More. In an era of less.

New Haven is like so many other cities whose news environment has been ravaged by corporate conglomerates — newsrooms closed altogether or eviscerated to bare bones. One remaining regional daily, continually being downsized. One remaining regional radio news outlet, mostly dependent on feeds. So what we offer first is more local news coverage. Just about the city and its neighborhoods. We also offer some new opportunities for civic engagement through the media, thanks to the tools offered by the Web. Citizens post comments directly on stories and debate each other online. They send us digital photos we can print. We don't have a limited news hole, so in addition to our original reporting we can link to press releases from community groups, as well as studies. We can also incorporate audio and video into stories. We have a crime map that lets people search by street, date, and/or crime type to find out about incidents on their block.

We don't replace what the daily paper or news station does. We build on it.

Andrew Donohue: Paul beat me to the answer — but I think it's true in both our cases. Competition and diversity. San Diego was once a three-newspaper town. The Union, the Evening Tribune and the Los Angeles Times' San Diego edition. But in the early '90s the Union and the Tribune merged and the L.A. Times closed shop and split town. That left the nation's eighth-largest city with one newspaper and an assortment of other niche publications. Like in any business, a lack of competition can leave you fat and lazy.

We think we've reinvigorated the local media scene through aggressive, in-depth reporting. Everyone's working harder now, and the public benefits from getting better stories from more diverse sources. On the opinion side, we offer a stark contrast to many of the viewpoints expressed on the editorial pages of the Union-Tribune. And we've got the region's only local political columnist. Plus, we do it all in a different forum. We are learning how powerful audio and interaction can be. And we're applying strong, solid news reporting in blog form as well to keep the site live and fresh during the day. It's good, old-school journalism with a new twist. And not only are we adding competition — but we're winning in many ways. Last month, among a number of other first-place awards for our reporting and opinions, we took home the San Diego Press Club's Best of Show for daily newspapers. That's the number one award for all of daily journalism for the year in San Diego.

So, as people bemoan the shrinking of the old structure of the newspaper business, we are instead incredibly optimistic of where journalism can go from here.

Gurwitt: You guys give a hint of it in your answers, but I'd like to get more specific: Can you describe how the actual journalism your sites do — uncovering stories, interviewing people involved, digging for the truth (or at least for facts) — is the same as what traditional news organizations do, and how it differs? And while we're at it, why are video, audio and public interaction such "powerful" features?

Donohue: We get this question, or a variation of it, often. We at voiceofsandiego.org are all traditional newspaper reporters. We use the same newsgathering skills we were taught in journalism school and at newspapers before arriving here. We have sources. We do public records requests. We hunt leads. We verify and recheck. It's all the good journalistic structures and ideals — just delivered in a different package.

Some people still think "Web site" and think it means we sit in our basements wearing sweatpants, sipping Diet Coke and spouting off all day. Nothing could be further from the truth. The NBA started using a new basketball this year. It's still basketball. The ball's just made out of a new material.

That said, being Web-only has opened up a whole new world to us. We have a great relationship with our readers, who contribute tips, ideas and even their own digging on a regular basis. Also, we've learned to use the blog format to tell running, breaking stories in a way that uses all the journalistic standards, but instead offers perhaps three entries a day over the period of a week or two. And because people now already know about the big news the day it happens, we can break the big news midday with a short piece and work on lengthy analysis piece to put it all in perspective for that day's edition. We also have a feature that's called "The People's Reporter" where one of our reporters hosts our Cafe San Diego blog, solicits questions from readers, tracks down the answers through traditional reporting techniques and reports back with the answers. Video, audio and interaction offer you a second, third and fourth dimension to a product that's been one-dimensional for centuries.

Bass: Lots of reporting is the same as traditional papers' work: We go to government meetings, cover breaking stories, cover crime, go to neighborhood events, analyze news, profile interesting people, cover theater and music. Unlike traditional media, we combine forms: On a news story about a government meeting on allowing the cops to use Tasers, our reporter then filmed the salesperson in a garage demonstrating how the guns work. When I've written about poets' new work, I video them reciting a poem so people can hear. Instead of traditional op-eds, we've had people write about their personal experiences or views about a local institution through a blog-like diary — a schoolteacher for a year, a bus-riding commuter. In the above answer, I also mentioned the crime map, which is unique to the Web, and readers' posted comments. Also, the linking to studies and other articles in other media or our own past articles adds a dimension that conventional media don't have available. The use of readers as proofreaders is also a unique Web element, I think.

Gurwitt: I'm curious about how you see the future of your particular sites. I had a conversation with Doug Rae, the Yale political scientist, who knows New Haven intimately. He said, "There is potential for the Independent developing a kind of plural structure where there are topically specific sheets that maybe other people run but are cross-linked, like high-school sports, or everything about a particular neighborhood, or a major controversy or string of controversies, or citizen monitoring of neighborhood policing. You can slice it in any number of dimensions. This would be the development of a web that is like a spider's web, and the spider in the middle is Paul and the Independent, and then an indefinite number of attached sites. I can imagine an evolution there which becomes a very powerful institution, one which works very differently from a daily newspaper." It's interesting, because what he's describing is almost like a newspaper, with all its different sections, but much more finely tuned and directed. As you both get used to this medium and its challenges and spend time looking ahead, do you see yourselves evolving in something like the direction Rae describes, or in other directions entirely?

Bass: Doug's idea is interesting about sites serving partly as portals to other sites. We all do that with our left-hand columns; for instance I link not just to interesting other media sites, but government agencies and Web services that tell you "fun things to do today" in New Haven.

Donohue: I see regional publications breaking down another way, too. Eventually, when nearly everyone's getting their news from the Internet, a daily newspaper in San Diego or Jacksonville or Milwaukee will have little need to worry about national and international news that they would normally cover with wire stories. I see the markets getting more and more niche, and local publications going the same way. People who are interested in national and international news on the Web now can already go to the New York Times or other major newspaper, knowing that it will be the best. Why do they need wire coverage from their local newspaper? I see the New York Times Web page becoming everyone's A section, and see the reader then simply switching sites to go to the B section for local news. And, because we don't have to worry about being anyone's A section, we never have to balance the newsworthiness of a mayor's announcement vs. the death of the Palestinian prime minister.

Gurwitt: That fits in with something that John DeStefano, the mayor of New Haven, said: "What's clearly happening in the print newspaper industry is a change that's leading to less attention to reporter-generated news and more to AP stories. I think that's created a market niche for organizations that want to serve a market that is very place-based and very focused on community stories. So entities such as the Independent serve a segment of the population, a niche, that craves connection to place." I guess I have three questions about that: Is he right that your audiences are niche audiences? Do you want to expand beyond that community-focused niche? And is that particular slice of the local audience enough to sustain your operations — even though you don't have to worry about profits?

Bass: I think John's right. I also think that this "niche" has been historically profitable and/or able to sustain local media: people who live in or care about a city. It only recently became a "niche." It has become more of a defined "niche" as corporations swallowed up dailies and made them more regional (partly to save money, partly to appeal to suburban advertisers). So, yes, I want that "niche," which used to be known as a news outlet's general audience. Also, the Internet broadens that niche to people all over the world interested in our city or the issues being discussed here. So the "local" niche is becoming two-dimensional: geographically based, and interest-based.

Donohue: Take away the international wire stories, the cars section, the touchy-feely weekend lifestyle sections, daily sports coverage, the comics and the crossword puzzle from the traditional big daily newspaper and what do you have? The local news pieces that focus on quality of life: government, air, health, housing, jobs, etc. So, that's what we cover. It's not necessarily that we're specialized, it's that we don't focus on the all the frills. We just focus on the local news — hard news, more often than not.

The first thing we learned with the size of our staff was that we couldn't be everything to everyone. We chose the things we thought were most important and most under-reported and set out to be the absolute best and most in-depth on those issues. Every time we can expand our budget, we choose the next thing that we want to focus on. So it's not that we're necessarily serving a niche on purpose, but that as we grow we are slowly able to expand the number of issues that we cover. We only cover them if we can be the best on that topic.

I absolutely believe the local audience exists to sustain operations. I also believe that the Internet is fundamentally a better place to advertise for companies than in newspapers. The ads are in color, can be done in video with audio, and are inserted in the middle and on top of stories. In a newspaper, if you advertise in black and white with a full spread on page A6, you only get those readers that happen to make it to that one page in all the many, many pages in that publication. Internet ads can rotate through all the stories on a Web site and it can be monitored. That's not supposed to be a sales pitch — I believe that the tipping point is coming as advertisers follow readers in their shift away from the printed page and toward the Internet.

Gurwitt: So can you tell me something about your audiences — who they are, what kinds of neighborhoods they live in, what concerns them about your cities? What kinds of stories do people respond to? How do public officials respond to the stories you run? And has feedback from your audience changed your approach either to your mix of stories or to your focus since your sites began?

Bass: I would define our audience as people who are engaged in the life of the city — through government, block watches, schools, theaters, etc. It cuts across class and racial lines. I first noticed this when we wrote about murders of teen-agers in poor, largely black neighborhoods. The victims' family and neighbors posted comments. So did white suburbanites they'd never meet. They had a dialogue they'd never have outside the virtual world; that was one of the goals of the site. (For examples of where such dialogue took place, click here and here.) That "caring about the city" demographic includes people who have moved away and want to keep in touch with what's going on here.

I also wanted to second Andrew's comment about focusing on hard news and what we do best. That's very much our mission, too. (I was amazed to see how much our business plan, down to the editorial and funding formulas, matched voiceofsandiego's, when we both came up with them unaware of each other; albeit ours is on a smaller scale than theirs.) Focusing on that mission has meant abandoning some stuff that was dear to me the 25 prior years on the beat — in-depth features, opinion columns, investigative reporting. We hope to incorporate some of that gradually. (I now do a weekly v-log commentary, for instance.) But we felt we had to focus on that core mission, because in New Haven, as in so many communities pauperized by corporate media monopolies in print and on radio, hard breaking news is what has been sacrificed. And it's a vital first step in rebuilding the bricks of civil society in our communities. End of sermon.

Donohue: Our readers are pretty much the same — those who are engaged in the city. Many of our readers come from neighborhoods that typically house the affluent and well-educated. I think, and hope, that readership expands the more communities we move ourselves into and the more diverse our subject matter becomes. People are most interested in the issues that impact them personally. We learned that when we put a reporter on the housing-market beat and watched our hits skyrocket — simple reports on housing data became more well read than some of our intensive and in-depth reporting. Public officials respond to us like they do to any media coverage. Some of our pieces have spurred investigations or other actions, like steering the dialogue on a mayoral campaign. Readers obviously have a strong impact on our approach, but more through their hits than through anything. We learn through every site report what people get into and what they don't. More than anything, it's helped push us to keep coming with new ideas and find ways to spin off popular new ideas.

The one thing I worry about with the switch to online media is the accessibility to those who don't have Internet. We run the risk of creating a wider gulf between the haves and have-nots if accessibility to quality media coverage necessitates a computer, modem and Internet connection rather than a couple of quarters and a street corner. Hopefully Internet access is becoming ubiquitous enough that this won't be an issue by the time the paper copy vanishes.

Gurwitt: Thank you both for being so thoughtful, stimulating and willing to go along with this. Let's finish off with two questions. Do you foresee a day when there are multiple sites like yours competing for a local readership in New Haven or San Diego? And, given the cuts taking place at newspapers across the country, I know there are any number of journalists or civic leaders who are already thinking about how to do what you've been doing. Do you have any advice for them?

Donohue: I don't see anyone, for now, trying to do what we're doing in covering the same subjects. But I don't see why they wouldn't step in and fill another gap like sports or business reporting or something like that. I do foresee the day, though, when paper is an afterthought and every publication — whether new or 200 years old — is focused on the Internet. Sure, someone will always need something to read on the bus or at the laundromat. But the generational shift toward the Internet will only get stronger as today's college students get older.

We have been getting solicited for advice often lately by other journalists across the country looking to follow our model. My advice is simple: have a personality. Know what you want to be and be proud about it. You'll likely be small, so be the absolute best at a specific thing and grow from there. Oh, and one more thing: Treat your readers with more intellectual respect than the big guys do.

Bass: I definitely see the day of multiple sites, a constantly evolving roster similar to the old days of multiple dailies and local news radio outlets in the same city. One difference: I think many will crash and burn, to be replaced by new ones, some of different political persuasions, others non-ideological; some more video- or audio-oriented, others more text-oriented. I think this is great for democracy. Print will remain because I think the newspaper of five years from now will be a combined print-audio-video-Web-site outlet that people will access from a single box in their house or from their cellphones; with the "newspaper" coming out in a smaller form to a smaller group of subscribers, but with more people overall receiving the news. Reporters won't be broken up into "print" or "radio" or "Internet" reporters. They'll be like the Independent reporters — go out on stories recording video or audio and taking notes, and filing stories that can be accessed (read, heard, watched) in different formats. I confess: I'm an optimist.

Advice: Do it. Just go out and start posting locally reported news stories on the Web. Include options for public participation. Be creative in using print, audio and video files to tell your stories. Don't be hung up on being ultra professional to start with. But do adhere to professional standards. And e-mail me if you need advice on financing or formatting, etc. It's a bloodless revolution!

You can reach Paul Bass at p.bass@newhavenindependent.org, and Andrew Donohue at andrew.donohue@voiceofsandiego.org.