Making Good Work our Niche
There’s been a lot of just-below-the-surface discussion lately about news orgs finding stories they can own. Des Moines owns the Iowa Caucus. The Washington Post is the source for national politics. And in the biggest official move towards this kind of thinking, the Deseret News has decided it wants to serve up LDS news for the whole world.
The thinking goes something like: “Hey, what with this new-fangled InterTubes thing, we can draw visitors from all over the web. So how can we ge them to come here?” And widgets, digg/reddit submissions, and RSS feeds ensue.
The shortcoming is that not all newspapers have that one thing that’s going to draw the whole web audience to their doorstep. I mean, as cool as Branson is, I just don’t think that’s going to cut it. So nevermind the whole Interweb — if you gain a national following of LDS devotees but lose the geographic draw of your own city, you’re going to lose money. End of story. Staying relevant at home has to come first. Once you have that down, the rest can follow.
So enough lead-in. Here’s the article that got me thinking. Why? Because I’ve made the same argument in the past, and almost got laughed out of the room. But here goes again:
By my estimate, There are two types of newspaper stories: Whoswhats and whyhows. The former is newspaper of record stuff; hirings, firings, reports, meetings, births, deaths and all the rest. The latter is everything else; your insightful features (how does a person with X disease et through the day?), your incisive investigations, or even the not-so incisive (Why did they lose X amount of my money?).
We’ve spilled many a bucket of ink on the whoswhats over the years. But with TV, local news sites, and all forms of niche publications, it represents the low-hanging fruit — the stuff any wannabe journo with a Blogger Profile or a minute of airtime can do.
Investigations. Asking hard questions. Providing information that no one else can provide. Or wants to. That is what we can offer that no one else can. Several organizations are covering City Hall, but not everyone is willing to look at overtime. Or liability payments. Or the role of campaign contributions in City decisions.
Even with IRE pounding the idea of CAR into newsroom heads for decades, the fact still remains: We geeks are uniquely qualified to do these stories. And now, more than ever, our industry needs just that.