On Friday Eye on Blogs discovered a
post at Crazy in Suburbia about the possibility of local newspapers outsourcing their neighborhood reporting to offshore sites. We discussed the ramifications of a move like that, and how metroblogs could soon be the first stop for locals who want real news about their immediate surroundings.
CBS 5's Joe Vazquez did a story yesterday on the Tribune's financial hard times and the overall fate of newspapers in the country. He interviewed
C.W. Nevius, a columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle, and asked him about the possibility of blogs stepping up where the bloated mainstream media is falling down. His response was, to put it mildly, lacking.
Apparently C.W. Nevius doesn't read blogs like A Better Oakland, whose author attends city council meetings and reports on those events. He must not also be aware of Claycord.com, whose Mayor has generated a healthy community of tipsters and readers who break news consitently (and correctly) in their cities. Because C.W. Nevius said that he doesn't think blogs will usurp mainstream media for local reporting because blogs rip off mainstream media organizations. And with a snarky tone, too:
Bloggers do a nice job and that’s fine. But what I see bloggers doing is taking the raw material they get from news organizations like this and riffing off of it. If the bloggers didn’t have us to do the start of the work for them, I don’t know what they’d blog on. So, I’d be interested to see how that happens. They’re talking pretty big now, we’ll see where they go.
This is, for all intents and purposes, mostly true. But if you are going to comment on whether or not metrobloggers might one day take the place of traditional journalists, then you might want to avoid stereotypes and look into what you are talking about. Because there are hundreds of blogs that break local news faster and better than their professional media counterparts, none of which is dependent on any prior reporting. These bloggers have contacts with their local police depoartment, relationships with their councilmembers and most importantly, a keen vantage point from which to report--smack dab in the middle of the cities on which they gather facts.
I'm not saying that most bloggers don't piggyback off corporate media. They do, widely and shamelessly. But there are legitimate beat reporters not working for the pages of the Tribune or the Chronicle. They are breaking news without any overhead. And they are not to be ignored. Media types do so at their own peril.
UPDATE, 1:27 p.m.: The Mayor at Claycord is fired up, and rightly so:
We don't have the Bay City News Service or the Associated Press to
do our stories for us, we don't rely on our "sister stations" all over
the country to give us their reports, we don't have reporters stationed
all over the Bay Area to cover material. We don't have all that, and
yet we still beat you when it counts!
I have a message to you, C.W. Nevius, read CLAYCORD.com for a week, then tell me who's ripping who off!
Oh,
by the way, there was just a multiple injury rollover crash on
highway-680, does the Chronicle have that story yet, or are you gonna
"rip it off" from CLAYCORD?
