New Bay Area news service draws varied reaction
The announcement by philanthropist Warren Hellman (left) that he is pledging $5 million to kick-start a new online Bay Area news service in conjunction with KQED, UC’s journalism school and possibly the New York Times has prompted a variety of responses.
Robert Gammon in The East Bay Express probably came out most strongly against the initiative, saying it represented a threat to Bay Area journalism as well as to the long-term fortunes of journalism students in the area.
Perhaps not surprisingly, given his position as an adjunct professor at the J-School, Silicon Valley new-media consultant Alan Mutter passed no comment on the development and merely reported it on his blog, Reflections of a Newsosaur.
Susan Mernit, who is about to launch hyperlocal blog called Oakland Local, was ambivalent on her own blog, but concluded that, “As much as I worry that Hellman’s project will suck $$ from my own little project and other wonderful smaller sites I see emerging, the Hellman project feels more like a replacement for something we’ve lost — the big (bloated?) newsrooms of the corporate papers — not the local sites that are close to their community.”
All the major news media have reported the initiative whose website can be found here and its Facebook page, launched just today, has already attracted about 240, mostly encouraging, followers.
InBerkeley on Twitter
InBerkeley on Facebook
Gammon’s scare tactics really put me off, especially when he said, “…the public will be forced to increasingly depend on inexperienced, unpaid students to inform them about what’s happening in the region,” as if this isn’t one of the top j-schools in the country, and as if some of the best j-professors won’t be supervising them. From what I’ve seen of the reporting from the j-school students on their local blogs, the public has a lot to look forward to. The whole article smells of sour grapes.
I think Gammon has a plausible concern but one that is not obviously correct. He’s assuming a zero-sum game. He is assuming that this new NPO will draw attention (hence revenue) away from for-profit journalism. Yet if this new NPO is well conceived and run, it should actually turn out to be a resource that boosts the effectiveness and relevance of the for-profit journalism sector.
There is, most definitely, a progressive cause in questioning the exploitation of not only the free labor of students, but labor that students (or their benefactors) *pay* to provide. It sounds potentially very anti-labor in that sense. It should be structured so that the students see wages from this beast. Gammon may have an “unfair competition” argument there. But he rushes to judgment in fretting that the new resource will force for-profit outlets to contract. Quite the opposite outcome is equally possible.
-t
Good piece, Tracy. I hope that Hellman & co will partner with the local sites and news entities that already have skin in the game, and not reinvent the wheel. I also hope they will do some regranting, since that has been proven to be an effective model to spark development–and would support some of the non UCB efforts happening around the Bay area.
I hope that this does become a project to replace big news media rather than local blogs. I like to get truly local news, opinion, and event information from blogs like InBerkeley and other hyperlocal blogs.
I’m supportive of the project in general because it’s clear that there is a shift happening in media, and until we know what the outcome of that shift will be, it’s best to try out any possible solutions. If we know an end to traditional media is coming, why not experiment to find the best possible replacement?