Wouldn’t you love to see Mayor Daley squirm as John Callaway asked him about Olympic budget cost guarantees he never shared with the voters? Or what about a one-on-one with Oprah? Or an unscripted half-hour with our latest political celebrity Patti Blagojevich (”What advice did your dad, Ald. Dick Mell, give you on which defense attorney to hire?”)?

Photo by Karen Kring. John Callaway, Thom Clark & Geoff Dougherty at 2/22/09 “Future of Journalism” Town Hall Meeting

Master interviewer John Callaway died Tuesday evening of a heart attack at 72. I find myself already missing some of the interviews I wish he’d completed. The long-time host of WTTW Channel 11’s “Chicago Tonight,” Callaway gained a deserved reputation as one of the region’s premier interviewers. Like Workshop mentor Studs Terkel, Callaway could push his subjects beyond their prepared sound bites to probe a celebrity’s motives, question a politician’s manevuers, or help illuminate an author’s tome. Ironically, Callaway was the only nominee to ever turn down a Studs Terkel Community Media Award, believing a younger person should fill the slot.

John was always well-read and well-prepared for his interviews, but his intellectual prowess didn’t overwhelm or overtake his subjects. His wonderment and curiosity informed so much of his work, as displayed in a one-man show of his life produced for a week or two at Pegasus Theatre in 2001. My last encounter with him was sharing the panel at last February’s Town Hall Meeting on the future of journalism, a somewhat bleak afternoon for traditional journalism, where John was typically inciteful about a city without daily newspapers and bloggers who steal content.

Now I don’t how public television’s digital signal will pick this up, but I understand John’s next interview will be with St. Peter to explore who paid for the pearly gates.

Thom Clark

One reason there has not been much posted here over the past 10 weeks or so is that we’ve been busy pulling together a report on the state of local online news in Chicago, The NEW News: Journalism We Want and Need for The Chicago Community Trust. It’s not about how to pay for local news, but why we pay for it–and about who’s doing what online in Chicago.

It’s the first time anyone we know of has tried to assemble a report quite like it, that combines a directory of who’s doing what, some thoughts about where local print and online news is actually at in terms of coverage, and some thoughts on the kind of news we want. Some key thoughts:

• There’s less local news in the newspaper, these days, but no guarantee that online news publications will do any better.
• Online news publications will need to adopt some of the characteristics of local news—include news vetted by editors, copy editors, etc., select stories that both entertain and inform their audiences, and perhaps most importantly that they create a forum for one conversation, a universal feature that is hard to arrive at on the Internet, which drives us toward so many unique, small, even idiosyncratic news sources.
• Assembling such a report in such a short period of time (we surveyed producers of more than 80 online news publications, looked for trends in local news coverage in the Tribune and Sun-Times over 20 years—mostly, it’s declined, and conducted focus groups with nonprofit community leaders) was a job of work.

Our main goal was to add a different note to the conversation about how to save news… for audiences that are able to hear it. It will be too bad if the folks we respect and admire in metropolitan newsrooms are unable to take it in or get much benefit from the research.

One columnist’s take
Shame on me for not living up to my own spokesperson training rules: I spent two hours explaining all this to Phil Rosenthal, Tribune media columnist, explaining what we did and did not find about local online news in Chicago, to wind up reading a column this morning in which he says he thinks the whole project was waste of time. Now why am I surprised?

Obviously you can read his column here, and draw your own conclusions, but he seems to have wound up feeling that everything is fine in the news business so why don’t we just keep things the way they are. Hello? Shouldn’t have to explain to the media columnist, why the status quo is unworkable (our study does not focus on the news business’ money problems but they are obviously a sign that things need to change).

Find out for yourself… download your own copy here.

As struggling local newspapers continue to abandon the printed page, foundations, entrepreneurs and journalists are launching “hyperlocal” and watchdog news Web sites.

Where and who are they? What do they tell us about the new media landscape?

We’ve pinpointed significant news Web sites emerging around the United States and beyond by creating this custom Google Map for the Community Media Workshop.

Chicago is fertile ground for a number of “new news” sites, such as LISC/New Communities, Chi-Town Daily News and EveryBlock, to name just a few.

Click on the map, then zoom in or search it for specific locations to get a closer view of the emerging players in online news.

Have more sites to add? Please tell us in the comments!

–Elsa Wenzel

I hope Ken Davis is happy. Something really has come out of Sunday’s Journalism Town Hall thang. Maybe not what he imagined (a shot in the arm for old-school newsies?). Instead, I predict quickening of the pace for new news practitioners. Be careful what you wish for, right?

I’m a little out of sync on the topic compared to, say, Kiyoshi Martinez, who just frickin’ breaks the business model conversation down and reassembles it (nice work), Geoff Dougherty’s constructive plan for the $2 million newsroom, or Windy Citizen’s back and forth on how the hell a journalist keeps her damn job.

Because of what we do at the Workshop, it’s the content that matters more to us — the promise of news to “afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted” to quote the ever quotable Mr. Dooley (ie columnist Finley Peter Dunne) — and the power of  metropolitan journalism to set agendas for the region.

So let’s just keep in mind the goal we want to hit. How good a job do our existing news outlets do at that? How can we redesign them to do even better? Or is the system perfect right now, just broke?

Pew released the audience numbers for Internet, Print, and TV in December 2008.

In case you’re always late to parties, like me, a little graphic that explains what you already know if you obsessively ask folks (as we often do, in the course of our workshops), “did you read a newspaper today? listen to the radio? go online for news” etc. etc.

No, it does not say print is dead–though that would make a better blog post (or headline), wouldn’t it? But it does say that the Internet is where huge chunks of audience are. Read the rest of this entry »

Here’s an interesting short piece on nonprofit news models in Chicago from Crain’s Chicago Business multimedia (you’ll have to watch a short ad). Adrian Holovaty of Everyblock and Josh Karp of The Printed Blog are profiled, Beachwood Reporter and Gaper’s Block get a kind of pan-across a few times. If you’re keeping track, you probably will not learn anything new here… but if you’re trying to keep up, the segment’s worth 5:04 minutes.

Of course if you’re reading this, what you may want to know is, are they pitchable? Obviously, new  news media–online–are playing by totally different rules and i am not even sure if that is still a good criterion to apply. Certainly they both provide opportunities to upload  your own material for consideration–Everyblock through its collection of RSS feeds and The Printed Blog from–it looks like–it’s home page. Pitchable or not, I don’t know, but Josh Karp is clearly the William Randolph Hearst–or should that be the Joseph Pulitzer?–of 21st Century publishers.

Hey, The Chicago Tribune has a feature running on their home page for Chicago’s best blogs. Come on, you know you want to nominate CMW! For npcommunicator, or Curtis Black’s Newstips blog… or both!

I just found it because I was looking for a web version of a “wrapper” that came on this morning’s home delivery Tribune discussing some tweaks to the print edition and reiterating the paper’s “mission.” That’s a promising sign.

Less promising: In an article in The Atlantic, writer Michael Hirschorn envisions the question “[W]hat if The New York Times goes out of business—like, this May?” (thanks, Kevin Taglang at Benton Foundation). 

It reminds me of what we see again and again with smaller news outlets: at the margins, news publishing is thriving… but metro news is just taking a tremendous beating. Another way to say that is, anyone can do news and eke out a living, but big bucks are hard to come by. That’s how the news business started in this country. It’s hard to believe that’s what we would go back to.

In a  week with a bankruptcy, a corrupt governor, a global story about workers and the financial bailout, where do you start? It’s almost too good to be true!

Tribune Co. bankruptcy is bizarre… but it’s more about the news business than the news. Yes, we may quibble about what it looks like and what stories end up in the paper (my personal least favorite from my local Tribune this week is a magazine article noting that Logan Square is “hot.” Still? Just now? Again?) Anyway, we may not always agree with our editors’ choices but would still lose big time  if pro journalists, who go find stuff that they think we all need to know, to fade away.

As Vincent Duffy, news director of Michigan Radio, said at a panel discussion in Flint last week, “You can’t yet get a computer to actually stick a microphone in [Flint] Mayor Williamson’s face … I don’t know how you’re going to hear the news in the future but you are going to hear us [journalists] reporting.” Also on the bankruptcy, remember that the Chicago Reader declared bankruptcy a few months back and they are still publishing fine.

A quick side note on the news business, crucial to remember when you think about the model: ethnic and community news outlets are doing fine! So before we go to thinking about the death of news, let’s celebrate the kind of journalism that makes a governor try to knock out a Tribune editorial board member (if John McCormick does not get a raise out of this, it’s a shame–bankruptcy or no) and raise up our community and ethnic news outlets, like this morning’s story (quoting, ahem, me).

It’s a bit off the beaten track for this blog  but too delicious to pass up. Rush Limbaugh blasted Chicago Sun-Times columnist for taking on McCain-Palin on his show yesterday: “Mary Mitchell, a wuss, wimp columnist for the Chicago Sun-Times says that Sarah Palin should be censured.”

Whatever Mary Mitchell is, she’s not a wuss or wimp. “When you step on a pig’s tail, it squeals,” she fired back in her column today, and raked up Rush’s drug addiction in 2003, which threw his job into jeopardy, until deferred prosecution allowed him to return to work. Mary plans to talk more about it 6  to 8 a.m. Sunday on her V-103 Chicago morning show (live stream).

So who should you put your money on, the “wuss” or the “squealer?” It’s gonna be ugly but fun to hear, folks!

Well, while we have been pitching journalists about how Chicago nonprofits are leading innovation in use of social media both to advance their missions and grow their organizations, the news media has been covering a bunch of our other activities! Read the rest of this entry »