We were invited to participate in a forum last Saturday at KPCC’s Crawford Family Center. “The Changing Face of Community Journalism” mashed together practitioners from a variety of media: public radio and television, community news websites, blogs, and internet radio under the auspices of the Society of Professional Journalists. (Thanks to Dan Evans for putting this all together).
There were nine speakers, each restricted to five minutes (more or less), followed by a panel (which we were not invited to participate in). Without diminishing in any way any of the speakers, the ones we found most intriguing were Jesus Sanchez, who runs a site similar to ours, The EastsiderLA.com; Michael Linder, whose internet radio station KVB.FM sells the news and lifestyle of Venice Beach to a wide audience (it’s local but they have a substantial number of listeners in the British Isles); and Chris Jennewein, senior regional editor for Patch.com out of San Diego.
As the final speaker, our entirely selfish personal goal was to tell Altadenablog’s story of community journalism in such passionate detail that they would regret not putting us on the panel (and we think we succeeded on that one!)
The key point of our planned presentation was how the Station Fire helped mold and define us: where this website became the hub for community information because so many of you, our readers, contributed to the coverage -- telling what was happening in your neighborhoods, sharing pictures and stories, offering your help to your neighbors in many ways. This is truly a new model for newsgathering that we are creating.
But another important point -- and what got us a lot of applause and after-presentation compliments -- was a tangent we didn’t intend to get into, but did: why a locally-owned news site rather than a large corporation’s McNews? We think we had something unique to contribute to that -- not only because we’ve been running a local news website for three years, but we were offered the chance to turn it into a Patch and said no.
That’s been much on our mind lately, which seemed to be a week of AOL revelations: the leaking of their corporate master plan, the 80:80:80 strategy, and Sunday’s announcement that AOL has purchased the Huffington Post and Arianna Huffington will now assume responsibility for all of their content, which includes Patch.com. So forgive this if this is all inside baseball.
And we say all this with great admiration for the Altadena Patch crew, who have put together one of the better Patches we’ve seen. (We even came to their defense later in ithe program). We also have lots of friends who freelance for various Patches. So our critiques are entirely about the corporation and the business model.
During our presentation, we just had a little time to touch on something we call Three (now Four) Questions To Ask when Patch Moves Into Your Town. There are no right or wrong answers to this, just openings to discussion.
- Remember that AOL is in this to make money. Nothing wrong with that -- so are we. However, AOL has identified small local business as a revenue source for the large corporation, and the major game plan with Patch is to have local businesses buy ads so the local Patch can ship bucketloads of money to New York City to feed AOL executives and stockholders. With a local news website, the money stays in town. Question: is removing money from the community in the best interests of that community?
- If I go to a Burger King in Pasadena, West Covina, or Maine, I know exactly what I’ll get. It’s a uniform, predictable experience -- that’s what they’re selling. But if I want to know something deeper about a town, I’ll go into their local coffee shop or restaurant, the one that’s not part of a national chain.
Your community is unique in its place, history, and the people who live in it.
In order for AOL to make money, they’ve got to operate on economies of scale -- so each Patch more or less looks and operates alike. For example, AOL says that moms drive most spending in a household, so you’ve got to attract the moms -- and most of the Patches we’ve looked at right now are pushing Mom-grabbing ideas like “Mom of the Year.” It's a content factory, like Burger King is a food factory. Question: Can a website that looks and acts like a thousand others properly serve your unique community? - Question: Do you want the voice of your community to be the one AOL gives you?
Since the Huffington Post purchase was announced on Sunday, we’ve added another question:
4. The Huffington Post is a website that has always pushed a particular point of view -- nothing wrong with that. And Arianna has been very good at promoting and protecting her own personal brand. Now that Patch is a branch of the Huffington Post, and uniformity of look and coverage is very important to the Patch model, what does that mean to local points of view if they run counter to the Huffington brand? Question: is it good or bad for 1,000 different communities to have the same direction for news and opinion? (Remember: the FTC hates it when a company owns too many TV/radio stations and newspapers, because of the uniformity of points of view -- what would they think of 1,000 websites?)
As we said, these are just questions to which we are not proposing answers. We think for some communities -- those without robust local news operations -- Patch may be a godsend. But there are always trade-offs, and we always think those need to be considered.
One of the takeaways we had (besides that we should've passed out promotional pens, because God knows Patch did) is that this is a very interesting, volatile time in the news business -- and we like and believe very much in what we're doing, and hope you do, too!
