Why Local News is Your Future

As the San Francisco Chronicle shrinks both figuratively and literally (it reduced its size this week and there is barely any news in it since 150 staffers were let go) journalists around the region are looking for new models on covering the news.

There are lots of different news sites popping up to fill the void, such as SFist, SF Appeal, The Public Press, and the San Francisco Sentinel. They are all sites that try and give a global perspective to the region.

But if a gathering of about 20 local bloggers Thursday night at the Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism is any indication, the future belongs to sites that focus not on broad swaths of territory, but small neighborhoods. I am referring to hyper-local sites, places where readers can get news about local stores, local crime, and good eats, as well as larger stories that look at government institutions.

The group came together to talk about the successes and struggles of running a website on a shoestring. While the discussion focused to a large degree on how to earn income from a hyper-local blog, it also strayed into questions on how to keep a site current with fresh material, how to increase the impact of a story, and ways to collaborate.

The journalism school has jumped into the hyper-local vision of journalism in a big way: using money it got from the Knight Foundation it has started a number of neighborhood web sites. Now first semester students spend their time reporting in one central city or neighborhood and posting stories to that site. This fall students will report for Mission Local, a site that covers the San Francisco Mission district; Oakland North, a site that covers the northern section of Oakland, and a new site for the city of Richmond.

It's not just journalism schools and independents who are going hyper-local. The New York Times has set up a series of blogs on its website that cover small neighborhoods. SFGate is also experimenting with some of these sites. There is one in Marin and one in Alameda.

I attended the meeting because I have been blogging about the Bay Area literary scene at Ghost Word for four years. It’s not really a hyper-local site though. Recently I have started to contribute to InBerkeley, a new website started by Lance Knobel and Dave Winer, so I rode in on their coattails. (I am also now blogging for SFGate as one of their City Brights writers)

While the meeting was mostly a get-to-know-you discussion, it was gratifying to discover that journalists and community activists are trying to fill the void left by the decline of traditional newspaper journalism. There are many good local sites out there. Here are a few:


InBerkeley
Oakland North
Mission Local
A Better Oakland
California Beat
Future Oakland
The Island
Albany Today
N Judah Chronicles
The Oakbook
El Cerrito Wire
The Harrioak News
Church Hill People's News
San Francisco Everyblock
RVA News (a collection of Richmond blogs)
Hills and Heights (Richmond)
Near West End News (Richmond)
North Richmond News
River District News

While Spot.us is not a hyper-local site, its success is definitely tied to them. It's s site to pioneer "community-funded" journalism, Freelancers post story ideas on the site and people pledge donations to fund various investigations.

The Future of the San Francisco Chronicle is up for Debate

The Newspaper Guild agreed over the weekend to deep cuts in benefits and other giveaways in an attempt to save the San Francisco Chronicle from closing.

By agreeing to only take three, instead of four, weeks of paid vacation and waiving seniority rules for firing, the guild will save about 100 editorial jobs. Now the Hearst Corporation will only lay off 150 reporters and editors and other workers instead of 225.

I do not know how the Chronicle will continue to publish. It currently has about 250 editorial employees. The proposed layoffs mean Hearst plans to put out a major metropolitan newspaper with only 100 reporters and such.

If you thought your Chronicle was short on news before, just wait.

There will be a number of public discussions this week about the future of the Chronicle. The UC Berkeley School of Journalism is hosting one tonight, March 16, at 6 pm at Northgate Hall on the UC campus. This is sort of a curious one for it features geographer and author Grey Brechin, journalist Lowell Bergman and “San Francisco civic leader” Clint Reilly, the man who sued Media News for creating a monopoly and got a column in exchange.

The northern California chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists is hosting a meeting Tuesday at 5:30 pm at the Main Library in San Francisco to discuss the same topic. Also a curious mix: Bruce Brugmann, the owner of the Bay Guardian, Louis Freedberg, a former Chronicle columnist who has started a non-profit media foundation called the California Media Collaborative, Martin Reynolds, the editor of the Oakland Tribune, David Weir, an investigative journalist formerly associated with Wired magazine and the Center for Investigative Reporting. (These are the people who have RSVP'd to the event of Facebook)

What’s missing from both these gatherings is representatives from the Hearst Corporation and people who actually work for the Chronicle. Perhaps they don’t want their attendance broadcast publicly and will just show up instead.

Still, there clearly is concern in the community about the fate of the paper and a willingness to stave off its demise.

The World is Hungry for News of Gavin Newsom's Affair

I really wasn’t all that excited by the news that San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom had an
affair with the wife of his campaign manager. But I guess I am in the minority. The Chronicle’s website got a record number of hits Thursday, garnering 4.8 million hits.

That’s 400,000 more than its last record-breaking day, which was Election Day 2006, according to Editor and Publisher.

In recognition of the importance of new media over old, the Chronicle decided to break the news of the affair on its web site rather than waiting for the next day’s newspaper. SFGate posted the article at 8 pm on Wednesday.

"Even two years ago, there would have been one article and there would have been a great debate about posting it on the Web the night before," Peter Negulescu, the Chronicle's vice president for digital media, told Editor and Publisher. "Today, we push it out to the Web site, it gets picked up by people like Drudge and Google News and the next day people are commenting on it. The press conference comes, we have raw feed of the video and the amount of content we can package around it is huge."