Talking Points Memo has done some good in-depth reporting. For example they helped expose a lot of the scandal around U.S. attorneys being fired. I think they also started the scandal around Trent Lott at Strom Thurmond's birthday party.
I guess this is not "crime reporting" in the Baltimore Sun sense. A lot more bloggers will go after national news, since it's more common for blogs to have a national audience. Blogging just isn't organized around the city level like journalism is.
Blogging just isn't organized around the city level like journalism is.
This sentence is probably true at the moment. Yet it still amuses me greatly. It's like living in 1910 and reading an article about the automobile. ("They're great toys for rich people, but they just don't have the same rich infrastructure that the horse and buggy does.")
The word weblog is not yet twelve years old. The short form, blog, will celebrate its tenth birthday in a couple of months. This technology is a baby. And on the local scene bloggers compete for audience with newspapers, radio, and TV, which have had a headstart of between fifty and four hundred years, and which even now command large budgets, large staffs, and a lot of very flashy advertising.
I hope you're right! I would love to read interesting blogs about San Francisco (where I live) and it sure seems like if it would happen anywhere, it would happen here. So far I haven't found any SF-focused blogs that I want to read.
The short of it - unless the paper cuts expenses by somewhere in the range of 50%, Hearst will will sell it. And in this economic climate, that's code for close it; see the Rocky Mountain News (http://www.vimeo.com/3390739) or the Tucson Citizen.
IF the SF Chronicle goes under - making San Francisco the first major metro market without a daily paper - I have no doubt that the displaced journalists and strong startup culture of the area will forge the first steps to a true, information era watch dog journalism.
In short, newspapers need to stop pretending they still cover the news so that the next generation can figure out how to make this work.
And no, citizen journalists and the twitterati are not the answer. Great journalism can only exist when it can support the salary of a great journalist. Otherwise, that journalist WILL go work as a spin doctor for whatever private firm or state government will pay them. I've seen it happen many many times. How can an unpaid citizen journalist match wits with that?
My startup, The Windy Citizen is a social news site for Chicago. When Citizen journalists post something to their blogs, they submit it to the Windy Citizen and Chicagoans can vote it up and check it out. We're sending 50-100 readers to the sites that crack the front page right now...and those stories are then showing up in the local papers since reporters and editors are reading us.
3 years from now there will be hundreds of local blogs in every U.S. city. We need "interesting-ness" filters for this stuff just like we need filters for tech blogs and political blogs right now.
If there's anyone out there interested in chipping in some tech expertise to help out (I'm a journalist and am bootstrapping this) I'm all ears.
I guess this is not "crime reporting" in the Baltimore Sun sense. A lot more bloggers will go after national news, since it's more common for blogs to have a national audience. Blogging just isn't organized around the city level like journalism is.