The Globe has served us for years, but its financial dysfunction is staggering. It doesn’t work any more. Period.
Instead of trying to prop up this dying system, our community needs to come up with new ways to make information public, share it and discuss it.
We’re already seeing online substitutes for some pieces of The Globe. Red Sox commentary is ubiquitous, sites like Blue Mass Group have rich political discourse and there is a fair amount of local arts coverage on the web. Of course, it’s not clear what will replace The Globe’s hard news and investigative journalism. I believe there will be less need for original hard news reporting as primary sources do the reporting themselves, but there will still be a big hole, without a clear way to fill it.
There is one thing we can do: Experiment.
Instead of pouring one huge chunk of money into The Globe, The Boston Foundation should fund community news experiments. They should fund people like Adam Gaffin who are highlighting local blogs, sites like Somerville Voices that are organizing community discussions and local versions of the Sunlight Foundation that are helping make government data public.
The Knight Foundation’s News Challenge is a great model for this approach. If the Boston Foundation started giving away grants to creative local news experiments, their inboxes would be stuffed with great ideas.
We’re in the midst of a revolution. Blood is being shed. It’s nasty out there.
The good news is that once we get through this rough patch, we’re going to have an information ecosystem that is far richer, more diverse and more truthful than the one we have now. I’m looking forward to it.
P.S. If this issue is important to you, these recent posts by Clay Shirky and Steven Johnson are required reading.
Gotta say, Rick, I totally disagree with you on that. The day on which we rely on government officials to tell us what we “need to know” will be a very bad one indeed for democracy.
I definitely didn’t say “rely.” You’re right, we can’t rely on government, and thanks for pushing me to clarify that point.
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p>However, if government makes their data public in a useable format, it’s a lot easier to work with, understand and critque. Instead of having 10 reporters devoted to driving around various city and state offices collecting documents, one reporter can download the data and analyze it far quicker and more thoroughly than traditional reporters could.
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p>Also, we’re not relying completely on the government. All the stakeholders should be publishing their own media. So, yeah, maybe you don’t buy what the EOT says on its blog — but the unions, the riders’ groups and others should be correcting them on their blogs. There’s no reason the correction has to be done by The Globe.
WHAT about them?
Internet access is as fundamental to modern life as telephone, electricity, and water.
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p>You’re absolutely correct that too many people still lack internet access. I think we should provide it and keep moving.
A post from the future! How is the war with the machines going?
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p>Your view is defensible, but I believe you are projecting. My father doesn’t use the Internet, not even e-mail, and his fundamentals are met.
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p>Incidentally, most libraries provide Internet access — which is good, because I think it will be a while before universal access is funded (especially since phones, electricity, and water are not yet universal).
I agree that state politics, top-line analysis and investigative journalism are the three main roles where the Globe should be the natural go-to source. However, on the last of it, I haven’t seen too much investigative journalism. The only thing I’ve read in the Globe is two articles by some college students on the shocking fact that Boston police cruisers often park illegally around the police station.
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p>Next thing you know, there may be a hard-hitting series that reveals that there is illegal gambling going on in the back rooms of Chinatown restaurants.
beware fish of the day!
the Globe’s series on Partners was both investigative and frakking awesome.
We do need to come up with a way to deal with the new paradigm. As the earlier poster commented, we can’t trust government to give us all the information. This is why transparency is key. All documents should be available online, all meetings should be available online if not live streamed. That way we can all be investigative journalists at home.
I agree with the point that some experimentation will need to take place as we find what works, but just propping up the old way of doing things is not going to move us forward.
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p>I attended the Mayor’s presentation of the budget to the Boston City Council today, easily the most important thing they work on during the year and there were no print reporters there, just Channel 7. Boston should lead the technology charge to make government transparent. If that meeting had been shown over the internet I’m sure many people would be interested to learn about cuts to the schools and police direct from the Mayor.
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p>Read my write up of the meeting at http://electkevin.blogspot.com/
It’s not.
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p>Yes, the internet changes a lot, but many, many people still want to read things on paper, and that is not going to change anytime soon, and unlike internet content which can be relatively easily filtered to remove advertising, paper advertising is going to be seen as long as people still read on paper. It’s only a question of scaling back the costs to match the reality of a smaller advertising market and using smarter printing and delivery technology to deliver a more targeted product that can justify higher ad rates.
I really think the way the news is presented is not the issue. There are pros and cons to paper vs electronic presentations. And I think the print version is going to continue to decline as electronic devices merge portability with readability. (desktop to Blackberry to iPhone to Kindle)
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p>To me the real tragedy is the loss of professional journalism. Though it may have seen a decline in recent years, there is a level of training and accepted standards in journalism. The waters have gotten muddied as the ratio of news to opinion has changed (and for the worse, I’d say).
But the traditional news organization that gathers and presents the stories of the day striving for context without bias is a vital part of our democracy and lives.
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p>The current trajectory makes me fear we’ll end up in a position where you have no context for determining whether source A is any more reliable than sources B-Z.
I think we, as a Greater Boston community, should look at nonprofit models and ways at saving the Globe. I’d prefer that the NYT sell the Globe for pennies on the dollar to a Boston group — some in Boston have had interest. However, that doesn’t mean some nonprofit like the Boston Foundation shouldn’t be looking at creating its own nonprofit news branch, one that could focus on the hard stuff and investigative pieces. It could be online only, or be a weekly.
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p>The Foundation Report in Boston is a hard-hitting investigative piece of journalism I would like to ready every week, if it existed. Better yet if it’s kept up to date online not just with its hard-hitting pieces, but by good blog updates by its writers every few days.