From the category archives:

Community

Tomorrow’s Local Newspaper May Not Be a Newspaper at All

August 31, 2010

A few months ago, the town where I live was hit by a major storm. Luckily, no one was hurt; but we had experienced what is called a “macro burst,” and everyone was understandably shaken up by all of the fallen trees and downed power lines. The storm only lasted a total of twenty minutes, [...]

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Talk Radio Will Die Without Local Journalists

July 12, 2010

This is because journalists are the most important link in the news food chain. Let me explain: I had this realization a couple of days ago while I was listening to a talk radio program. Somehow, the topic of daily routines came up, and the talk show host decided to describe his own. Each day [...]

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You Can’t Do HyperLocal from the Corporate Ivory Tower!

April 12, 2010

Dear New York Times, I recently read a blog post over at editorsweblog.org about your “hyperlocal efforts.” It cites your recent collaboration with Fwix in order to conglomerate news about particular local areas into a massive “local” news database, all from the comfort of your corporate ivory tower. Using Fwix’s software, you would gather all [...]

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We Need Local News Now! Not a Week Later.

April 5, 2010

A few weekends ago, the Boston area where I live was pummeled with rain. We received twelve inches of rain in two days, about one third of our average yearly rain fall. As soon as the flood waters started to rise, I was desperate to get up to the minute accurate information. So I turned [...]

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Can Crowd Sourcing Work for Local News? The Power of Community

February 21, 2010

As you know, the purpose of this blog is to answer the question, “What would the local news business look like if it were invented today?” And we are asking you to contribute to this blog, to critique and to add to our ideas in order to create a new business model for local news. [...]

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Whatever Happened to Email? That’s Why Local News Needs to Go Hybrid

February 14, 2010

At 7:30, this Sunday morning, I was begrudgingly awoken by a plaintive and incessant beeping coming from a distant room in my house. It turned out to be the very last of our land-line portable phones, the sole survivor of our family’s slow conversion to complete reliance on cellular. We hardly ever use it, and [...]

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Who Reads Local Newspapers, and Why?

February 7, 2010

As we started to go into in our first post, the question we want to answer with Civic Edition is: What would the local newspaper business look like if it where invented today? If we were to forget everything that we know about how local newspapers have worked in the past and build a system [...]

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