Ken Davis, many years ago the program director of WBEZ, has decided to step up and try to save journalism in Chicago. He’s assembling an all-star roster of local talent and putting it on display February 22 in a three-hour forum devoted to the flatlining local news business.
I’m glad Davis vented, and I hope that’s now out of his system. The Reader‘s original owners weren’t greedy, weren’t stupid, and didn’t build an empire too big not to collapse. But have you seen the size of the Reader lately? Seventy years ago there were well-run railroads and there were badly run railroads—and in the end they all lost their passenger traffic to the airlines.
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As they saw it, a democratic society is in a state of constant conversation, and without newspapers they weren’t sure how their conversation could continue. A journalism consisting of narrowly focused online news sites and legions of independent amateurs was something they couldn’t quite get their minds around.
And the panel, for all its old-school experience, strikes me as short on the next generation of news producers and consumers—i.e., the people most likely to brim with original ideas about how to get from here to there, and about what there looks like. Beers told me about a couple of “buzzwords” he floated in San Francisco that caught on—presumably because the rescue process is still in that early, desperate stage when people cling to buzzwords. One was hybrid model—to describe for-profit online sites like his own that oversee not-for-profit reporting initiatives the foundations can get behind. The other was coopetition. That’s Beers’s term for a Common Market sort of online world in which sites link to each other in the name of synergy while promoting their individual brands. “Those ideas sound a little soft,” Beers admitted, “but they got it going.”
Writing at the online Daily Beast a few days after Rod Blagojevich was arrested last month, James Warren, formerly the Tribune‘s managing editor, wondered why his old paper’s editors were bragging about their “virginity.” If it was true that Blagojevich had tried to make the Tribune Company fire editorial writers the governor didn’t like, why would the editors boast “that none of their corporate superiors breathed a word of this to them”?
