Discussion of Twin Cities News(papers) Hosted by KFAI

Yesterday, I participated in KFAI’s Speaker Series presentation of long-time, award-winning Twin Cities journalist Nick Coleman. I sat on the panel of public affairs programmers in my capacity as an independent self-publisher on the topic of the Twin Cities (aka a cityblogger) for going on five years, first at the Minneapolis Metblog and now at my own site, fresh.mn. My fellow panelists were:

• Jeremy Iggers, executive director of the Twin Cities Media Alliance which, among other things, publishes the Twin Cities Daily Planet, a premier online resource for access to community and ethnic media
• Lynnell Mickelsen, cohost of KFAI’s Truth to Tell
• Laura Waterman-Wittstock, a former journalist, author, advocate for the American Indian community, and host of KFAI’s First Nations Radio
• Mike McIntee, executive producer for The Uptake

Nick Coleman opened the program with his remarks and took some questions, and then we each had the opportunity to respond to his comments and take more audience questions.

I have several points that I try to make whenever I participate in this discussion.

• Young people and old people consume their news in fundamentally different ways. This is often overlooked and misunderstood by older journalists, even though they are making valiant efforts to adapt.
• I know the words “blog” and “blogger” have a particular connotation and those terms are often used condescendingly and with disdain. It’s very important to make the distinction between the message and the medium. Blogs are a legitimate platform for self-publication.

The discussion mainly centered around the changes in newspapers (and, to a lesser extent, journalism in general). In short, the increasing emphasis on short-term profit by disinterested ownership and dwindling editorial cojones have resulted in the newspapers of today, such as they are.

One thing missing from the conversation was the fundamentally different way in which younger folks consume media in general and news in particular. Putting aside the specifics of the whizbang new media tools of the day, the fact is that we consume our news by reading it on the internet (desktop/laptop/mobile) or by listening to it on the radio (live, or time-shifted via podcast). We attempt to moderate the massive information flow for ourselves by depending on recommendations from our friends or being extremely selective about the sites we consume.

Related to that, technology significantly influences our consumption. I think there’s a lot of opportunity in the actual digital delivery. I think there’s even more opportunity in non-disruptive payment mechanisms. I’m willing to concede the fact that eventually we may all have to pay to consume news online. In the interim, make it dead simple for me to send voluntary micropayments for acts of journalism that I do find worth my time. I’d like to see these on a per-article or per-author basis. Within iTunes or within Amazon, it’s frighteningly easy to spend money. Make it equally as simple for me to throw a tip to journalism I appreciate in a targeted way.

I had a personal revelation not long ago when it came to buying iPhone applications. There are so many free apps out there, it makes you think that you should be able to get what you want without having to pay for it. But what I get out of that one app I paid $3 for was completely worth the money. I spend way more than $3 on a regular basis without even thinking. It’s a paradigm shift to learn to attach value to journalism in the same way.

Further reading:

• In These Times: Death of the Newspaperman, by David Simon, former Baltimore Sun reporter and creator of HBO’s The Wire
• Newsless.org: The 3 key parts of news stories you usually don’t get, by Matt Thompson
• spot.us, a community-funded reporting project in which users request reporting on a topic, journalists pitch a story, users pitch in to fund the reporting, and the resulting work is available for publishing under a Creative Commons license
• LazyLightning.org, an example of a superb cityblog (covering the Twin Cities South Metro) produced by engaged citizen Bill Roehl who does it because he loves it and thinks it’s important

My thanks to KFAI News Director Ahndi Fridell for asking me to participate.