Champion Newspaper Profiles DeKalb Community Blogs

Jonathan Cribbs wrote a front page story about DeKalb’s three most prominent local, community blogs in this week’s issue to the Champion Newspaper.

John Heneghan, Dave and I, all give our thoughts on the rise and importance of our county’s community blogs. Good reading if you don’t already get enough of us on a daily basis.

BTW, I’ve decided to retire the term “hyper-local” from my lexicon.  From here on out I will be employing “community” in its stead.  Why?  Because I’ve come to realize that the “hyper-local” descriptor doesn’t go far enough in describing these types of blogs.  In my estimation the unifying aspect of blogs like those profiled in the article is not just that they are more local-centric than the city dailies, but that they actively support their communities.  Our tactics may be different, but our motive is universal.

Its a small, but I think, important semantic change if you care about such things.

Should Newspapers Hattip?

The battlelines between journalists and bloggers have long been drawn with all the old, familiar criticisms.

Journalists pshaw bloggers lack of journalistic cred, while bloggers scoff at journalists meager understanding of the online medium and all that it offers.  This furious “why I’m important and you’re not” argument is indicative of any medium in transition.   Its a fight for professional survival.

But in my opinion, there’s a much more interesting conflict out there that isn’t getting nearly enough attention.

Newspapers have long gnashed their teeth regarding the frequent blogger action of using “fair use excerpts” from their articles in postings.  At their best, these excerpts give bloggers a jumping off point where they take a recent topic discussed in a paper and use it to steer the conversation in another direction, providing a different and often more critical point of view.  At their worst, “fair use” is interpreted too liberally, resulting in excerpts that are anything but, leaving the blog reader with little reason to click-over to the actual article.

This issue has long put thoughtful bloggers on the defensive, with each having to personally reconcile this reliance on a disapproving host.   My own solution includes cutting out most “fair use excerpts” from my posts and instead I provide general summaries in my own words.   Its not a perfect, guilt-free methodology.  I acknowledge that if I “over-summarize”, I pose the same risk as the liberal “excerpter” and veer into those dangerous waters where the click-over becomes unnecessary.

But it is on this point that I wish to turn the tables on newspapers and provide a long overdue counterpoint to the “fair use” rage.

Layoff Rumors Prove Reality: AJC Cuts 30% of Staff

This morning, the AJC announced plans to downsize from 323 full-time employees to 230.  That’s a 28.79% reduction in staff…which they round up to 30%.  The paper also announced another reduction in distribution area, eliminating service in Barrow, Bibb, Clarke, Houston, Monroe, Oconee and Putnam Counties.

As the article points out, the AJC had around 500 staffers in 2006.  By May, they’ll have only 230.  That’s a 54% decline in three years.

So how does the AJC plan to survive?  This paragraph from a letter sent to staff by AJC editor Julia Wallace sums it up…

Our mission and goals remain the same. We need to continue to grow digital. We need to produce a very high-quality Sunday newspaper, filled with unique local content. And we must produce a daily newspaper that quickly and efficiently tells our readers the news of the day of and the news coming up.

The focus on local is reassuring.  The lack of ad dollars online is not.

Will the AJC be able to right the ship?  And how many people will be left if/when it does?  Its become a gripping news story in itself.

h/t:  Fresh Loaf

Decatur Blogs Make Learning About Local Gov’t Bearable

DHS teacher Chris Billingsley notifies us that he’s been using DM and InDecatur this week to teach a unit on local government!

Just to let you know that DHS students in the 9th grade have been looking at your Decatur Metro blog this week as part of a unit on local government. Many of my students complain that the only thing more boring than local government is yard work. Not true but it can be hard to get students excited about Decatur unless you mention zombies. The students were very interested in the information posted on Indecatur and Decatur Metro blog sites concerning the movies being filmed this week in Decatur. One of my students later told me, “Your class was not too boring today.” Thanks Decatur Bloggers!

What is the world coming to!

But seriously.  Wow.  I’m flattered!  As I’ve discovered for myself over the past year and a half, local activity is just as interesting, if not more so, than anything at the monolith, national level any day.  You just need to know where to look.

Thanks for stopping by DHS students!  Come back tomorrow (and the next day) and amidst the seemingly ENDLESS talk about development, I promise to incorporate more talk of zombies even when its completely unnecessary and inappropriate.

One more photo after the jump.

Another Round of AJC Layoffs?

Creative Loafing reports a substantial blood-letting at the AJC may be imminent.

When and how does this ever stop?

Does an online news”paper” model require such a reduction in staff?  With these layoffs, will we finally have a sustainable business model?  Right now local news is written like its a recap for the rest of the metro area and not to keep potential affected citizens informed (see: Hey Atlanta, Decatur’s reconfiguring its school system and parents are concerned!“)  At what point does the news get so watered down that people just stop reading?

Why not take a gamble and just make it a pay site?  Or at least make local news pay-only.  Keep all that AP, NY Times and WaPo stuff free.  Lord knows “The Buzz” is a right and not a privilege. Who else out there can report local news on the same scale?  In a choice between pay or nothing, which would you choose?

And what’s the worst that happens?  More layoffs?

Nothing like a post full of questions to solve the world’s problems.

Disclaimer: Be aware that I know little to nothing about newspaper business models, except that online ad revenue is a joke (funny: scared, not funny: haha) and that Craigslist is Satan reborn as free, online classifieds.