A Garden...of News

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Between the PI announcing the newspaper is either going under or online only and the Times cutting jobs and sections out of the newspaper, people often ask us if being a journalism major right now is really such a good idea.

Thankfully the answer is still yes. Because despite everything, at the very least people will always need news.

Also with some photo skills, a little video knowledge, some techno-savvy lingo, one might still do all right in this business. It pays having a few (lots of) geeky friends. So at least we can jump head first into all newspapers who are transferring online-branching out to a global market.

Let's stop for a minute though. What if we tried something different? What if we took the idea of taking the market online but instead of marketing out, we marketed in? Taking online news and making it local instead of global--or even better, making it hyperlocal.

Really? Can you make the internet local, much less hyperlocal?

You can if 1. you begin targeting your news to a very specific audience, such as a neighborhood or city section and 2. if you incorporate community journalism. That's the idea behind the very new company: Serra Media. Mark Briggs and Glenn Thomas have started a new section of very experimental journalism that is being tested by three local Washington newspapers and various (vary willing) schools of journalism around the state. (What can I say? With every speaker who comes to our school ending their presentations with "hey all our jobs are frozen right now...but good luck when you get out there!"...it's not exactly an era to turn down new opportunities).

The idea is that the page will have section that is divided by neighborhood. Anyone can post information, journalists and neighbors alike. Stories that come up on the news feed pertain only to the area. So things that might not be breaking news but it still important can make the feed. So community members can read what important to them, and journalists can still get closer to their community by reporting in it.

© Copyright 2009 Serra Media, LLC
"The more that people [that] collaborate to build this information resource, the better it will be," Briggs said. "What it means to a news company is here's a platform to build hyperlocal publications in each of the communities they want to cover in a way that is networked together."

Briggs also said a big appeal is it would be a "one-stop-shop" of news pertaining to the reader.

So no pessimism or skepticism, dear reader. This looks like an amazing opportunity and one I look forward to working with. And if that doesn't work out I still have my nerd skills to fall back on.

//Cassi Bean