Representative Journalism

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. [...]

I blogged yesterday about strings attached to Representative Journalism. Commenter Noah Kunin, concerning my Joel Kramer interview, wrote: :
I think Kramer’s mentioning of “strings” is important but could be easily overcome by transparency in any practical Rep. Journalism model.
That being said, there are already thousands of hidden strings in the MSM – might [...]

In my IM Interview with Joel Kramer, the brains and part of the money behind MinnPost, he said:
One of the charms of the Internet is that we don’t have to pay extra distribution costs to get another reader in Ely. On the other hand, we won’t provide news coverage that is of interest only in [...]

Let’s say our Representative Journalism was a community of people interested in an economic opportunity and development reporter in a relatively economically depressed area. We estimate the total cost for that reporter including salary, benefits, editing support and newsroom overhead costs will be approximately $100,000 a year. To pay for it, the network weaver, [...]

Representative Journalism, a term coined by Leonard Witt, aims to build sustainable journalism one small group at a time. As mass journalism markets unbundle and become niche markets, news operations, if they are to survive, will have to join the niche movement rather than fight it. Rather than think in terms of a circulation of, [...]