News-Record.com

"Revolution, not evolution. Newspapers that want to form strong bonds with younger and more diverse readers must prepare themselves for nothing short of revolution."

-- The Readership Institute.

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"News happens, so we like to say, and thus shapes the newspaper. And, we are good at doing news, at responding, at chasing, at flooding the big story. We structure our newsrooms with a beat system designed to capture news as it flows from institution to institution -- from the legislature to the courts to the school board to the city council and on and on.

"What we are not good at is adapting this system to our local communities, to customizing the newsgathering process so it reflects the needs, desires and idiosyncrasies of the people who read -- or the people we'd like to read -- our newspapers. This is why the front pages and local story mixes of most American regional newspapers are so similar -- a national story or two, these days an Iraq story, maybe something from the statehouse about the budget and a couple of local stories, at least one of them about government or crime. If you stripped off the nameplates and removed the names of the local institutions from the stories, you'd be hard pressed to distinguish one of these papers from another.

"The front pages of these papers are less often a "happy accident" and more typically a sad reflection of a reflexive definition of what tradition has determined to be "news."

-- Tim Porter

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Mark Glaser describes the sort of company he wants to work for. Me too. Read the whole post.

"A news outlet that creates new content, aggregates the best outside content, and makes sense of everything, presenting it in a clear, simple format for the consumption of everyone.

"A company founded on the values of serving the public and allowing the public to serve journalism by participating in all discussions of mission and direction."

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"You're striking the perfect tenor on your blog; open, fun, conversational. If you are going to throw open your doors to whomever shows up you might as well throw a party when they do. Keep asking them for help and advice."

-- Zack Rosen

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"* What if we exploded our newsrooms rebuilt them from scratch?
* What if we could cover anything we wanted? Would we go to the same meetings, call thecops as much, fill the paper with so many stories about institutions?
* What if we stopped writing about things even journalists don't read? Let's be honest: Many journalists don't read their own newspapers because they find them boring. Why continue feeding that stuff to the public?"

-- Tim Porter

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"The time has come for online newspapers to embrace online community-building as a geographical phenomenon. The tools are there, waiting to be exploited by smart, reliable, journalists rooted in their communities."

-- Dan Froomkin

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"My biggest realization has been how much people construct their own daily news reports, plucking from a variety of official news sources such as newspapers or broadcast programs as well as from a variety of Web sites (news-oriented and non-news-oriented) and especially from conversations, phone calls and e-mails

"I think newspapers might do well to reinvent themselves as print portals to a wide variety of news sources. The paper can poition itself as a place to begin -- or as a place to come back to -- in seeing how all this news and information can be pieced together to create a coherent picture of the world. Right now, newspapers are a cacophonous assemblage of reports; they are not a coherent synthesis."

-- Cole Campbell as told to Jay Rosen

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"PressThink's Top Ten Ideas for 2004."

All of it.

-- Jay Rosen

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"Perhaps online newspapers should stop seeing themselves as 'things,' rather a point on the map where wonderful people cluster together to do wonderful things."

-- Hugh MacLeod via Jeff Jarvis.

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"The news isn't done when we print it. That's when the public can add questions, corrections, perspective. That will improve news. And it also will change our relationship with the public."

-- Jeff Jarvis

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"Imagine a newspaper that is only local news -- no sports, no business, little or no entertainment, and commodity national and international news treated as the I-saw-that-already commodity it is: only local news."

-- Jeff Jarvis.

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"That fast-to-publish content like that on blogs doesn't have to go through a rigorous editing process -- that there's value in the speed of blogging that can be applied to mainstream journalism. (If that sounds scary to editors, remember than when reporters go on live radio and TV programs, there's no editing there either. It's a matter of trust in the journalist to be given such freedom and responsibility.)

-- Steve Outing

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"They are linchpins for change, not for their own personal gain or to buck the status quo. Instead, they understand their mission: to use all of their collective talent to make the community a better place. To readers, this responsibility is not always obvious. But it flows naturally when newspapers succeed in shining light on real problems."

-- Gerald Boyd on good newspapers.

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"And, in a period when sources of news and opinion are at once exploding in number and narrowing in focus, I believe credibility counts most of all. This argues for greater transparency by newspapers, more interaction with the community and further dissolution of the barrier between the producers and consumers of news."

-- Tim Porter on Phil Meyer's book

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"With readership, advertising, staffing, newshole and public esteem declining, the industry has plenty to be worried about. So, yes, these are tough times, challenging times, even scary times.

"But they could turn out to be the best of times, if journalists quit feeling sorry for themselves and start working on winning the hearts and minds of readers with creative, captivating coverage."

-- Alan Mutter.

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"A growing movement in American journalism, of which this column is a part, is trying to illuminate for readers the connections between their local communities and the international world.

"The idea of glocal or worldplace news is that every place on earth is connected by strands of mutual influence, interdependence, and direct causality. Because the geographical distances are so great, say between Rochester, MN and Brooklyn, NY and Warsaw, Poland, it's often easy not to see those connections. But those connections are there, and together they make up not only one's place, but one's worldplace.

"The job of the worldplace reporter is to investigate and to write about his worldplace. The invisible strands of mutual influence connecting his place to the world, are his subject. They are what he tries to make visible, to bring into public light and public life."

-- Doug McGill

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"Though not one who ascribes simplistic partisan biases to your work, I and many others can still have trouble deciphering your decision making process. The guidelines you outlined above may seem rote and obvious to journalists in the daily grind but, especially given the behavior of some media outlets, your respect for and adherence to them is not a foregone conclusion, even for readers who have some familiarity with journalism. It's worth reaffirming."

-- Chewie

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"Have a take and don't suck."

-- Jim Rome