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Rescue Me: Local News Reporters Trapped Inside a Burning Business Model

Every now and then, somebody finds a way to bring a fresh perspective to something that up to that moment, you thought was pretty well explained already.

We all know that local news models, both broadcast and print, are collapsing, right?  And we're pretty much in agreement that what comes next has yet to be fully understood.  Who, we wonder, will pay us to report the news?

Clay Shirky steps up today with an insightful experiment that clears the decks and gives us a new way of looking at just what we truly need to save in local news.  Save the local paper?  Not exactly.  Shirky says save the reporters.

Clay Shirky

Shirky was thinking about the high cost of "saving" a local paper--even one in a smaller city with a smaller workforce.  His hometown paper has 59 names on the masthead, and he thought at first glance that's a lot of people to support for a future news model like nonprofit.  At least it was until he started sifting through the paper (literally cutting it to shreds) in search of the news:

"I then cut up each page, labeling every piece in two separate ways. The first label was about content: News, Ads, and Other (opinion columns, sports, crosswords, and the rest.) The only judgement call was an article in the sports section about a judge’s ruling in the Major League Baseball steroids case; I put that in the News pile; the rest of sports went in Other."

Result?  The hometown paper was a bit of a bait and switch:  local news written by local reporters on the front and back page, and filler, fluff, ads and AP stories covering all the pages in between:

"The Trib seems to realize the importance of local reporting to their readers. The outside of the paper (front and back page of section A) was all local bylines and no wire service news, while the inside had not one local news byline. (Local opinion, yes. Local sports, doubly yes. Locally reported news? No.) The local reporters were (expensive) lures, put on the outside of a product that included none of their work, and lots of the AP’s, on the inside pages."

Boiled down and sliced up, the paper had the work of six local reporters--which turns out to be the entire "reporting" staff of the paper.  So, in a sense, "saving" local news vis a vis that paper means saving six jobs, not sixty.  And hypothetically (I do speak from some experience here, as a newly-hired community supported journalist) that is something a nonprofit formula could manage, if the community truly wants to keep local news reporters on the beat covering their town.

Shirky argues the six reporters, along with six more employees (editors and such--must we really save the editors?) would be the folks to rescue:  "what’s needed for a non-profit news plan to work isn’t an institutional conversion, it’s a rescue operation. There are dozen or so reporters and editors in Columbia, Missouri, whose daily and public work is critical to the orderly functioning of that town, and those people are trapped inside a burning business model. With that framing of the problem, the question is how to get them out safely."

This experiment could be easily applied to local television.  On a half-hour newscast, how many stories are really news, and how many are truly local?  Strip the fluff and filler away, and how many people do you need to do that work?  In your station, who should we rescue?