Representative Journalism

The New York Times has a story about the nonprofit St. Petersburg Times, with this key excerpt:
 “We don’t put out a newspaper to make money,” says Paul C. Tash, the chief executive of the Times Publishing Company, which oversees the paper. “We make money so we can put out a great newspaper.”
Still the St. Petersburg Times […]

Using Robert Picard as my touchstone, earlier I wrote that too many journalists lack value. They are all but cogs in a machine.  However, my idea of a Representative Journalist is someone who would provide plenty of value for a Representative Journalism community. So much value that rather than hiring a kid right out of college, the […]

 Saul Friedman, a 1963 Nieman Fellow and  former White House correspondent for Newsday and Knight Ridder newspapers, writes at Neiman Watchdog Blog:  
Why can’t reporters who cover their beats well and who become as expert as possible in that field–the law, courts, medicine, consumerism, politics, the Congress, even the presidency–write for their newspapers as if […]

Doc Searls, co-author of the The Cluetrain Manifesto, in talking about the new ecology of news writes:  
…the larger trend to watch over time is the inevitable decline in advertising support for journalistic work, and the growing need to find means for replacing that funding — or to face the fact that journalism will become largely an […]

So my brother who lives in Bonita Springs, Florida, wanted to know why anyone would pay a $100 to support a reporter, and why would 1,000 people do it? After all, the reporters he sees at his area’s papers are often young, inexperienced, don’t have a clue about life in his town and when they begin to learn […]

I ended Part I of this two-part post on how to save and produce book reviewers jobs everywhere with this CJR quote from Steve Wasserman, former book editor of the Los Angeles Times Book Review:
There is money to be made in culture, if only newspapers were nimble and imaginative enough to take advantage of the […]

When the Atlanta Journal-Constitution cut its book review editor, I started thinking of  how it might have been a different scenario in the Representative Journalism world. Then came the Columbia Journalism Review’s cover story by Steve Wasserman entitled Goodbye to All That: The decline of the coverage of books isn’t new, benign, or necessary. I knew it was […]

Last week I started the Representative Journalism blog. The most important lesson I learned during the first week is that Representative Journalists, and indeed all journalists, if they want, will be closely linked to their communities via established tools like Digg and Twitter and emerging tools like Publish2 and ReporTwitter.
 Audiences will easily be able to […]

Yesterday on this site I put up a little widget entitled “What I’m Thinking About,” it’s really a Twitter widget adapted for use here. I got the idea after David Cohn referred me to Ryan Sholin at Invisible Inkling. He writes at one of his posts:
I want the people formerly known as the audience to have a space […]

David Cohn at NewAssignment.net has been thinking about his own version of Representative Journalism. The other day he wrote at his blog:
Representative journalism, as I understand it, is very similar to what Innocentive has done for science research. (More reading: Our Assignment Zero interview with Alpheus Bingham, co-founder of Innocentive.)
I’d like to add my voice to the chorus. […]