Pointing to the future of newspapers?

Jeff Jarvis’ offers some interesting ideas on the potential nexus between blog-like online publications and traditional newspapers on his BuzzMachine blog. The gist of his argument can be summed up with his opening line:

Try this on as a new rule for newspapers: Cover what you do best. Link to the rest.

It is, as I said, an interesting idea, one worth considering, though I’m not sure how useful it will be for community weeklies like the Post and Press that focus on the most local of issues.

For bigger dailes — especially for papers like The New York Times and The Washington Post — this may be an approach that can allow them to provide real, useful and important news without ignoring the fluff and celebrity stuff that seems to be of interest to many out there. It is a way of targeting resources toward their best use.

“(I)n the age of the link,” Jarvis writes, the old ways are inefficient and self-defeating.

You can link to the stories that someone else did and to the rest of the world. And if you do that, it allows you to reallocate your dwindling resources to what matters, which in most cases should be local coverage.

This changes the dynamic of editorial decisions. Instead of saying, “we should have that” (and replicating what is already out there) you say, “what do we do best?” That is, “what is our unique value?” It means that when you sit down to see a story that others have worked on, you should ask, “can we do it better?” If not, then link. And devote your time to what you can do better.

We make this decision nearly everyday, picking and choosing what to cover, how much space and time to devote and how to play it. No newspaper can cover everything or devote the kind of resources we would like to the stories we do cover. And our resources are shrinking at a lightning pace.

So we have to rethink the “architecture of news” by finding new ways to cover things. Is the Jarvis model the right one? Perhaps, though there maybe other approaches. It is, however, something that is very much worth thinking about.

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Author: hankkalet

Hank Kalet is a poet and freelance journalist. He is the economic needs reporter for NJ Spotlight, teaches journalism at Rutgers University and writing at Middlesex County College and Brookdale Community College. He writes a semi-monthly column for the Progressive Populist. He is a lifelong fan of the New York Mets and New York Knicks, drinks too much coffee and attends as many Bruce Springsteen concerts as his meager finances will allow. He lives in South Brunswick with his wife Annie. View all posts by hankkalet