Why I Still Believe in Local Journalism
After decades in newsrooms, I’ve seen what trust and knowledge mean to a community and why Gina and I are building a model that values news creators, citizen engagement, and community knowledge
Hello everyone! After a series of life events and some travelling to check in on family, Gina and I are back and digging into some new stories.
On Friday, we’re going to start rolling out Gina’s new series on the Sisson Mine project and what it will mean to revive New Brunswick’s once-mighty mining sector.
I’m going to be diving into what sovereignty means in the digital age, with a look at machine learning, AI, data and the effects each is having on businesses and communities. We’ll get that started next week.
The other issue we’ve been following closely is the continuing evolution of journalism, and in particular, how to build a sustainable business model for localized reporting for a broad audience.
Engaging with a broad audience is the most important and challenging part of the puzzle because the media environment is so fractured, with the dominant digital business model laser-focused on niching down to serve very specific audiences.
It’s why you see so many advertising-based publications for sports, business and entertainment – we’re willing to pay for the fun stuff, and business people will pay for information that directly affects them.
That works as a financial model, but it sucks as a model for civic engagement, which is the original and most critical role of journalism in society.
On A Mission
The basic promise of journalism has always been this: to help people understand the world so you can make informed choices, grant informed consent, and contribute to informed conversations.
This is journalism’s role in a community; it is our mission.
For decades, that mission was supported by a sustainable business model that worked. Prior to Google’s advertising-anchored search model and social media, journalism was a highly efficient and effective way to disseminate knowledge to a broad audience.
It enabled social cohesion and understanding across three channels: print, which provided details; radio, which provided immediacy and mobility; and television, which provided immediacy and images. These three channels worked across four levels, local, regional, national, and international, stitched together by news networks such as CBC, CTV, Global, and the Canadian Press, a news cooperative for private radio, TV and newspapers.
The average person engaged across multiple channels, receiving information tailored to each platform and audience. It was a system designed for maximum comprehension and reach. And it worked.
Journalism was, for a long time, one of the most comprehensive mission-driven business sectors. Most of these channels were privately owned, but there was a balance: public broadcasters such as CBC ensured that communities where a business model wasn’t viable could still participate in the shared understanding that held society together.
Then came Google and social media, which sought to dismantle this model under the banner of “creative destruction.” When I started Wicked Ideas Media in 2012, seven years after Facebook debuted, I was told by one particular technology company founder and investor that social media was going to solve all the problems journalists had created by gatekeeping information – that the public would do it better and more efficiently than my colleagues or I had.
I knew he was wrong because I knew David Williams.
Back When Your Opinion Mattered
When you read a newspaper, you might notice the bylines and think journalists like me are singularly responsible for what you read, but that’s not true.
Journalism is a team effort because it is the exchange between reporters, columnists, researchers, and editors that creates great copy, and during my years at the Telegraph-Journal, I always valued the quiet insights David Williams provided.
David was the Letters to the Editor editor for the Saint John Times-Globe and the New Brunswick Telegraph-Journal. It was his job to read every single letter that came to us, either mailed or hand-delivered, before it was published.
If you wanted to know the mood of Saint Johnners or New Brunswickers, you could pop your head into David’s office, and he’d be able to tell you.
He could tell the difference between an organized writing campaign and a true groundswell of public outrage. For the former, he’d call the writers and politely explain that he would publish a sample of the letters but not all of them.
He called letter writers all the time. Sometimes it was to check legibility on a handwritten note, sometimes I’d hear him gently fact-checking writers’ claims, and other times he’d call to get a writer’s permission to copyedit something they’d written for clarity or for length. He checked people’s names and addresses.
He did all that because he understood that journalism wasn’t about keeping people out; it was about keeping knowledge accurate, contextual, and meaningful.
That’s how you build and maintain trust in a community, and when you have trust, you can have peace, order and good government.
Local journalism, when it is working properly, isn’t a gatekeeper; it’s a knowledge keeper.
That’s what has been lost, and that’s what we need to rebuild.
Onward
Gina and I, along with Paul Davis, who is working in the background on the business development side of things, are working to build that here on Canada’s East Coast.
Thanks for joining us and sticking with us as we figure out how to transition back into full-time journalists by building a business model that values news creators, citizen engagement, and community knowledge in equal measure.
Please let us know what you think and what you want in your news diet for the new year.
Cheers,
Lisa
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