John Tedesco

Conor Friedersdorf at the Atlantic offered a compelling example of the trait that differentiates a blogger or activist from a newspaper reporter:

Time.

Or more precisely, getting paid to spend the time to find out what’s really going on in your community.

There are many talented bloggers out there. But the vast majority of them don’t get paid a steady paycheck to go down to City Hall, spend all day at council meetings, scrutinize campaign finance reports, and do all the things you need to do to hold officials accountable.

Friedersdorf contrasted the work of a concerned citizen versus a newspaper reporter in California:

Let’s expound on the difference between Richard Marosi, Los Angeles Times reporter, acting as a government watchdog, and Miguel Figueroa, a lampshade maker, trying to do the same thing. Consider the task of getting the credit card bills that document graft in Lynwood. They are public records: state law mandates that the city turn them over to anyone who asks.

But a newspaper reporter has the time a lampshade maker doesn’t to go down to city hall during business hours; if the City Clerk wants to charge for photocopies, the reporter can expense it to the newspaper, whereas the lampshade maker pays out of pocket; should the City Clerk refuses to hand over the documents, the reporter can have an attorney at the newspaper draft a convincing letter, and write an article in the newspaper hammering the city for breaking the law; should the city clerk dally further, the reporter can have an LA Times attorney sue the city, and write another scathing story; and if the lawsuit drags on, he can stick it out, though that is seldom necessary, because when your legal adversary is correct on the merits, buys ink by the barrel, and cultivates a reputation for sticking things out, you rarely put them to the test.

Miguel Figueroa did far more than most Southern California residents ever would merely by pursuing the matter — it took him two years to get the credit card records. What did he do next? He called Richard Marosi, who launched an investigation, documenting enough abuses to sell his editors on a front page story, and creating enough of a public stir to take on the crooks in Lynwood. What would have happened if there weren’t any LA Times reporter assigned to that beat?

Probably nothing.

(Photo credit: Mike Licht on Flickr)

I wrote a story about the dangers of police chases that was published in Sunday’s paper. If you’re a subsciber to the San Antonio Express-News or bought Sunday’s edition, you could read my story. But you can’t read it online — it’s been embargoed for a few days.

I like the Internet. But I like newspapers, too. So I like this new experiment of putting an Internet embargo on a big Sunday story to encourage people to buy the newspaper. It’s actually one of the few innovative ideas generated from our higher-ups. Usually, the only change we hear about in the newsroom is an announcement every once in awhile that there’s going to be some lay offs or a whittling down of the paper, which in turn hurts our quality and gives readers fewer reasons to bother reading our stories.

But I actually like this idea of embargoed stories. It’s about time we give subscribers a reward for sticking with the paper. We’re jacking up rates yet giving away our content online for free, so we really need to give loyal readers a carrot instead of a stick. And it’s not quite the same thing as a pay wall — my entire story about police chases will be posted online in a few days. We’re just saying: If you pay for the paper, you get first dibs.

It’d be nice if we take this experiment to the next level: Give subscribers exclusive online content. When my Sunday story is posted online, it will feature a video of a chase taken from a police helicopter; a map of pursuits in San Antonio; a copy of a pursuit-evaluation report for a chase that killed an innocent bystander; and a link to the raw data we analyzed for the story.

The whole story was based on these primary resources. So if we’re really going to embrace this embargo concept, it’d be cool if we allowed subscribers to go online and check this exclusive content for themselves, before it’s released to the general public.

Maybe non-subscribers would consider signing up for this type of deal and subscribe. Or, for those who don’t want to receive the dead-tree version of the newspaper, we could allow them to pay a reduced price to sign up for online access to the exclusive stories that are published every Sunday.

Like I said, I like the Internet. But I also want to figure out a way to share online content, and reward our loyal subscribers who stick with the newspaper. Maybe this is a good compromise.

After online publications won Pulitzer Prizes this year, Dennis Yang at Techdirt asks if a blog could ever win:

Nothing about a physical newspaper inherently makes it better suited for doing great reporting. Print and online are just mediums, and as consumption patterns shift towards online, we should see more of this in the future.

As Yang notes, it’s unclear whether blogs that aren’t affiliated with a newspaper would be eligible to win the prize under the current Pulitzer rules. But putting that issue aside, Yang is right — there’s nothing stopping a blog from producing top-notch journalism. All it has to do is generate enough money to produce top-notch journalism. And there’s the rub.

It cost at least $100,000 for Sheri Fink’s prize-winning story about the life-and-death decisions at an isolated hospital in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. Zachary M. Seward at Nieman Journalism Lab got the cost breakdown:

Fink was paid $33,000 plus $10,000 in expenses for her Kaiser fellowship, according to Steve Engelberg, her editor at ProPublica, where she’s been for 14 months. Engelberg, who was kind enough to go through these figures with me, said, “Fourteen months of salary plus benefits for us easily gets you north of 100 plus, 100, 150 or something.” He threw in another $20,000 to $30,000 for travel expenses, in addition to three months of editing and lawyering at ProPublica and the Times, which also spent $25,000 to $30,000 on photographs, he said.

Those sky-high expenses are simply out of reach for the majority of bloggers who care passionately about their niche, but who blog on a part-time basis, and often for little or no money. That doesn’t mean they can’t produce an interesting, valuable blog. But it does make it exceedingly difficult to devote the time and effort it takes to interview sources, unearth hard-to-find records, overcome legal hurdles, and tell compelling stories. That takes time — and money.

Let’s say you care about local politics and you blog about your local city council. If you’re like most people, you’re blogging as a hobby and you have a full-time job. Right out of the gate, you’re at a disadvantage because you don’t have the luxury of attending the weekly city council meetings that usually last all day. Not to mention the countless subcommittees that meet every week. And you can’t capitalize on all the time spent hanging out at City Hall, where you meet sources, learn new things, get story ideas and tips, and start really understanding what makes City Hall tick.

Newspapers have traditionally paid the most money in their communities for reporters to pay attention to what’s happening at City Hall. And the police department. And the local utility. And so on. That’s why the slow demise of newspapers worries people like Clay Shirky, who argues it could take a very, very long time until anyone figures out how to consistently produce the kind of expensive, accountability journalism that newspapers funded but are cutting back:

Now this doesn’t mean that all newspapers go away. It does mean that a lot of them go away. … Which leaves us with a giant hole, and a very threatening one. And in the nightmare scenario that I’ve kind of been spinning at for the last couple years has been: Every town in this country of 500,000 or less just sinks into casual, endemic, civic corruption — that without somebody going down to the city council again today, just in case, that those places will simply revert to self-dealing. Not of epic, catastrophic sorts, but the sort that just takes five percent off the top. Newspapers have been our principal bulwark for that, and as they’re shrinking, that I think is where the threat is.

This YouTube video features Shirky’s entire talk — it’s worth a listen.

Shirky isn’t arguing that we need to save newspapers to preserve journalism — we just need to preserve journalism. And there’s the rub.

With all the doom and gloom we keep hearing about newspapers, you’d think no one ever reads them. Tell that to Aaron Blanco.

Six days ago, reporter Brian Chasnoff wrote a cool feature story about Blanco and his company, Brown Coffee Co., where Blanco roasts fresh coffee beans in small batches to unlock pungent, fruity flavors. I live in the neighborhood and have known Blanco for several years, and I volunteered to make an online video for the story. Photographer Lisa Krantz also stopped by the café to shoot some photos.

The story, photos and video were published Sunday. And since then, Blanco said new customers keep walking in the door. Today, someone brought a copy of the article and asked for Blanco’s autograph.

“It’s been great,” Blanco told me today when I bought a coffee — and later an espresso. “The article has drawn quite a bit of business my way.”

With so many layoffs in the news business, many people assume that readers have abandoned newspapers in droves. While print circulation is certainly down, news stories still make the rounds in print and on the Web. We have a money problem, not a readership problem.

Last year, I ran into another business owner who was profiled in the newspaper, and he had the same experience as Blanco. A talented intern at the San Antonio Express-News, Jaime Klein, wrote about an obscure barbershop downtown in the basement of the Sheraton Gunter Hotel. Here’s how the story started:

The Gunter Hotel’s basement was once a men’s refuge. In the 1950s, a man could feast at Rathskeller’s buffet, get steamed in the Turkish bath and then talk shop while getting a shave, haircut and shoeshine at the hotel’s barbershop. Before venturing home, he could stop on the main level to buy jewelry for his wife.

Most of the businesses closed in the 1960s, and the hotel’s housekeeping services now surround the barbershop — which turned 100 this year, the sole survivor of the “men’s center.”

Lee Bosman, the shop’s owner, was lucky enough to see some of what he calls the “golden days.” At 27, after retiring from the Navy and a short stint with aviation company Swearingen, he graduated from barber college and started at the shop in 1975. He never left.

I had never heard of the barbershop, so I stopped by for a shave and a shine. Bosman, the owner, was raving about the article. In fact, he had it framed. And, like Blanco, Bosman said new, curious customers visited the shop after the story was published.

Bosman told me he had doubted, at first, that a young intern from the newspaper would “get” his business. But she did.

“She did a really good job,” Bosman said.

I don’t think newspapers are perfect. But clearly they’re still making a difference — even at small cafés and barbershops.

OPERAPALOOZA!

God, I love the Onion.

And you thought today’s newspapers were archaic?

Paid for by the National Association of People Who Give Love a Bad Name.

A nice twist to the print vs. Web conflict.

(Hat tip: E&P in Exile)

I just got my copy of the San Francisco Panorama, the hefty, 320 page, one-time-only newspaper that feels as vast as the bridge pictured on its cover. The brainchild of David Eggers, the Panorama is intended to remind us what a newspaper can be — a skillfully written, stunningly designed product that grabs readers, surprises them and tells them something new about the world.

The problem is, it takes time — and money — to produce those kinds of stories. The Panorama is proof of this problem — it took five months to produce a single edition.

In the real world, the challenge facing newspapers is that they must be interesting every single day. And really, they’re only interesting some days. It’s hard to report and write an investigative story. It takes talent to write a colorful yarn that hooks readers and doesn’t let them go until the kicker. Readers have to decide if it’s worth the cost of a subscription to get those kinds of stories only some of the time.

I’m looking forward to reading the Panorama. But let’s be honest — it’s not a newspaper, a publication put out by frenetic, talented people on tight deadlines, who must often crank out stories about press conferences or humdrum public meetings to fill up the paper, but who also occasionally and miraculously smack us in the head with a powerful story that we never saw coming.