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The hyperlocal upstarts who would replace their hometown newspapers do well to remember the lessons associated with WaPo’s failure: namely, using outside reporters who were unable to integrate themselves into the neighborhood; lack of major promotion; inability to tie coverage to the print daily.
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Media companies have previously been anointers of the talented, by virtue of the production bottleneck. In a world of abundant producers, talent will continue to be scarce, but the talented will not lack for ways to display their work. This makes the market for talent a more ad hoc affair, less about artificial scarcity and more about mutual opportunity.
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New sources of news are proliferating online. Many, it is true, are unreliable. Most are badly funded. Some are the rantings of deranged extremists. But some—like Muckety, an American site which enriches news stories with interactive maps of the protagonists’ networks of influence, and NightJack, the revealing and depressing blog of an anonymous British policeman, which won the Orwell prize last month—enhance society’s understanding of itself, and could not have existed in the old world.
Dim Sum Digital 