by @BarryRafkind in Media
Posted on April 8, 2009 at 12:19 am
Last Modified on April 8, 2009 at 10:13 pm
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Our community is not being served adequately by the level of investigative reporting provided by our two local newspapers: The Somerville Journal and The Somerville News. There is a plethora of local blogs offering opinions and media filtering, but there remains a poverty of the kind of quality in-depth journalism that can only be obtained with funding. The recent contraction of local reporting by the Boston Globe will further diminish coverage of local issues.
There is much hand-wringing these days about the collapse of traditional news institutions that relied too heavily on fragile advertising business models. We at Somerville Voices are thinking about trying to pay for investigative journalism through a model called “crowd-funding”, in which readers pledge support towards the total cost of reporting on a story. No money is collected unless the total cost is covered by pledges and no one can give more than a small fraction of the whole amount. This model was tried successfully out in the SF Bay area by David Cohn at a site called Spot.Us.
Does the crowd-funding model sound viable for Somerville?
What stories would you like to see investigated?
Would you be willing to contribute financially for your news?
Please share your thoughts!
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updates:
- we’ve been linked from Universal Hub under How much would you pay for investigative reporting in Somerville?
- we’ve also been linked from Kat Powers’ blog on the Somerville Journal under Paying for Somerville news
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This is a good topic, particularly germane given the backdrop of the Globe drama. The Globe has declined, but in my opinion it still has far more cachet than either of the Somerville weeklies when doing an investigative piece. They probably just don’t have the staff anymore to cover enough local stories in depth, which is why we end up feeling like something is missing.
The Somerville Journal does a (petty) good job in covering the obvious (although who knows how long they’ll be around either). They seem to be missing either the incentive or the resources to dig deep, IMO. The Somerville News is pretty unique, they actually do run some stories with a little more depth. The problem is, every time I start reading the News I run across a wacky editorial that prompts me to vow to never read it again.
To answer your questions:
1. I don’t know. I just don’t know if Someerville is big and newsworthy enough to do this on our own. Part of me wants to Globe to shut down soon to motivate the start of a “MinnPost” type replacement for the whole Boston area. I mean, I really don’t want to lose the Globe but I am sick and tired of seeing it slowly wither away.
2. Many, many things. A certain alderman’s real estate endeavors (not that we don’t hear enough about it, but nobody has done an actual thorough, impartial, investigative report, as far as I know); perhaps a more in-depth look at what is going on with the repairs to the East Somerville Community School and why there seems to be a discrepancy between what the city wants/needs and what the fire insurance will pay for; the reason a popular state senator with familial ties to a children’s circus was allowed to (influence the decision to?) temporarily shut down a citizen funded off-leash dog area without any consultation with the community 2 years ago (water under the bridge perhaps, but at the time I would’ve liked to have seen a story on it); perhaps the whole “hidden camera” debate – I know it has been in the news, but not to the level of depth I would like to see the issue examined.
There are many, many other worthy issues I’m sure.
3. Yes, I would.
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Universal Hub has picked up this post. The comments there are worth reading.
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I would love to see in-depth investigative reporting on how the city actually spends its Community Development Block Grant monies. Here’s 5 questions off the bat:
Does the use of that funding actually address the needs of at least 70% of low income residents (HUD-mandated)?
How much of that money (which is not integrated into the City’s annual budget planning and report documents) is co-mingled with the Capital Needs allocations?
Are any of those funds, which pay for about 80% of the Office of Strategic Planning and Community Development’s staff salaries, involved in double-dipping?
Is there a tacit internal acceptance that – after these funds are used to plan out the development of (the currently low-income neighborhoods of) Union Square and East Somerville – the current low income residents, who will be challenged by the post-GreenLine increase in rents and market opportunities, are expendable?
And does the Citizen participation plan (HUD-mandated) ever have any meaningful impact in the final planning?!
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Steve, to respond to your first point: Is close to 76,000 people in the densest city in New England big enough for you? I’d say it is.
If by “newsworthy”, you mean worthy of knowing what’s going on, then yes. If by that, you mean a community in which there are many things to report on, then I’d say yes again, as evidenced by the ideas that you and eila came up with.
I want to see reporting and investigative journalism in the Boston area survive, but if it comes in a different form than The Globe, I’m fine with that.
I’d like to know more about our elected officials, their connections to local businesses, and the extent of nepotism at city hall. Specifically, I’d like to know more about the relationship between the city and the F.W. Russell garbage company.
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The problem is that each paper/blog has a certain “slant” – for the most part the Globe has been left and slanted it’s investigative reporting and editorials accordingly. That is one reason they’re dying… along with the free outlets (websites/blogs/etc).
Pledges to fund investigative reporting? So… let me ask….how would investigative reports from pledges from people all with one slanted viewpoint or “the other” be in any way objective or taken seriously by the majority of readers? Pledges BUY you a report you want – but maybe not the report that is correct.
Why not see if some of the returning college students want to “intern” as investigative reporters? They’ll probably do it for free.
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Harry, first of all, your argument about bias ignores other important factors in the demise of the newspaper industry such as the recession’s impact on advertisers and subscribers, the transfer of readership from print to electronic form, and the shift in classified ads from newspapers to Craigslist and other online forums.
What do you mean about the Globe having a lefty bias? Assuming this was the case, you are claiming that this bias is partly responsible for a decline in advertising revenue and/or a reduction in subscriptions. That would only make sense if advertisers or subscribers were turned off to a lefty slant AND if the newspaper has been gradually becoming more biased and/or the readers/advertisers have become less tolerant of that bias over time.
In short, your unsupported claim about lefty slant in the Globe having a causal relationship with the paper’s financial troubles is quite weak.
As for the crowd-funding model, I don’t think that contributors’ ideologies will bias the reporting since the model will ensure that a story be funded by a large (hopefully ideologically diverse) group. A second reason is that contributors will have the option of remaining anonymous, so for those that choose it, the reporter won’t even know who gave the money. Thirdly, journalists will have an incentive to report without bias if they want to build a reputation with integrity.
Pledges should enable a good story to be written, but yet not prescribe a conclusion for the reporter to validate.
Having said that, if lefty stories are most popular with our readers, then that bias will inevitably carry through to the types of stories that result.
On a higher level, readers are already voting for the type of journalism they prefer by which newspapers they subscribe to and visit regularly. Ideally, Somerville Voices would develop enough of a reputation so that readers would pay a subscription to support us. Not everyone will have the time and patience to individually fund stories, so I think a hybrid model, even including local advertising, is probably going to be more effective.
I’m not sure college students would work for free, although I’m intrigued by the suggestion. Usually interns require supervision and we don’t really have the resources for that. With money, we could possibly hire an experienced journalist/editor to manage interns, OR we could pay experienced free-lance reporters who need less supervision. The crowd-funding model is attractive because it offers a revenue source with much less effort than doing advertising or print subscriptions.
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Barry, the globe turned hard left a long time ago and it cost them dearly. I did mention blogs and other outlets killing them too, but ultimately it was the paper catering to the hard left that killed them. They’re now trying to go hard right, but too little too late.
So why would you think that another paper or outlet will “make it” that caters to only to one small segment (progressives)? You don’t really believe anyone that reads this blog sees it as anything but an outlet for the PDS.
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Harry, you haven’t convinced me either that the Globe “turned hard left” or that such a bias could be primarily responsible for the paper’s collapse, especially in light of the other very real factors that I have mentioned.
This blog is designed to express the viewpoints of the community, although we do not yet have full coverage of the community represented, but it’s what we strive for. To the extent that posters, including myself, have a lefty bias, I don’t think it turns off readers, at least it doesn’t seem to have turned you off. In fact, I wish we had more different perspectives, or voices, represented.
I’d say that a new, agile news platform in an under-covered community would have better-than-average chances of making it. Call me an optimist if you like!
Your rhetoric about PDS sounds an awful lot like the commentary from the Somerville News, do you work there, or something?
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Barry, responding to this posting, again I side with Harry. Each local paper and blog has a “slant” and any person with an ounce of intelligence can pick it up while reading. It is up to the reader to read and believe what they want to believe. I am not a PDSer or a hard leaning lefty and hopemy comments cause people to think there are others like me out in Somerville. And I would hope our comments are not shot down.
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