[LINK] "The Story on Urban Newsrooms Is Still Looking for Its Hero"

[rfmcdonald]

Bruce Sterling linked some time ago to Ariella Cohen's Next City commentary, with extensive infographics, on Greg Hanscom's article on the troubles facing online journalism. Unless you get grants--and even if you do--prospects seem dire.

In the past six years, since the Great Recession blew another hole in the hull of foundering urban news outlets, American journalists have patched together a ragtag fleet of lifeboats and makeshift rafts, platforms where they can do the work critical to upholding local democracy. A recent survey by the Pew Research Center’s Journalism Project found 438 small digital news organizations nationwide, fully 85 percent of which have popped up since 2005. (Pew did not count citizen bloggers.) A majority of these had three staffers or less, many of them refugees from legacy news outlets. More than half said they focus on local or hyperlocal news, while 45 specialize in investigative journalism. The implications for cities are profound.

“They’re clearly trying to fill some of the reporting gaps at the local level that have been left by legacy media,” says Mark Jurkowitz, the Journalism Project’s associate director, who authored the report. “It’s a new, interesting sector. If you’re focusing on City Hall, or the school system, or a neighborhood, that’s a mission that can be accomplished with just three or four staffers.”

But while organizations like Baltimore Brew have picked up crucial (if unsexy) beats such as schools and police policy, uncovered serious political scandals, and helped communities weather environmental catastrophe, their continued existence is far from certain. Many, but not all, of these outfits are non-profits, and almost without exception, they operate on a shoestring, based out of co-working spaces and staffers’ living rooms. While the creators of these sites are getting more and more business savvy, they continue to struggle to make ends meet.

More than a decade after traditional news outlets began their collapse, and five years into a national experiment in small-scale community journalism, the question remains: Can we find a way to support the media organizations that sustain our cities?