Representative Journalism

Chris Densmore, Chris Peck and I spent a big part of yesterday with our Northfield, Minnesota collaborators at Locally Grown, where the first Representative Journalismexperiment will take place. What a great group of people they are: Griff Wigley, Tracy Davis and Ross Currier. You can see and hear us on a podcast from the [...]

Things are moving forward for our Representative Journalism trial project in Northfield, Minnesota. First big news is a job opening. As you will see, it is a temporary, part-time gig, but could grow into something more permanent — but we can’t make any promises. Here is the job description, spread the word:
Northfield, Minnesota has [...]

Let the Representative Journalism begin, here is what I posted at the PJNet.org:
Hello Eric Von Hippel and thank you for convincing me that “free revealing” works.Several months ago, as regular readers of the PJNet.org know, I started freely revealing my idea of Representative Journalism to the world. Ruth Ann Harnisch, a former TV, print [...]

The New York Times has an article today on how Consumer Reports online survives from paid subscriptions, while the prevailing wisdom is that people will not pay for online information. Here is an excerpt:
For a decade, however, Consumer Reports has charged Internet readers the same price as print subscribers, currently $26 a year (or $5.99 for a [...]

At my sister site, PJNet.org, I have been running a series of videos on the future of journalism. Today I decided to run one of the videos here instead because it plays into the Representative Journalism concept so well. At ConvergeSouth 2007 I did an interview with Anton Zuiker of the Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill area of [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]