Slashdot: A Recipe for Newspaper Survival in the Internet Age

A really excellent read. Quite relevant to Singapore--if certain people are willing to listen--because we are small enough for even our national newspapers to be local:

Welcome to the Internet age, local newspaper (and TV) people. I can and do get my national and international news from the New York Times, The Washington Post, BBC, Al Jazeera, Fox News, CNN, and other online media that cover faraway events better and faster than you ever will. I turn to you for local news. You tell me more about last week's home invasion robbery on 11th Street East than they ever will.

It's time for local newspapers to become truly local; to feature local news on the front pages of both their Web sites and print editions, with only a few out-of-the-area stories up front, augmented by an above-the-fold story list that tells readers where to find national and international news on their inside pages.

Add readers' stories and comments to the mix and you suddenly have a local online community, not just a newspaper. This will not take work away from professional reporters, photographers, and editors, who will still be the foundation of local news-gathering. In fact, increased interaction with local community members will probably give them more work than ever, because they will find themselves inundated with news tips and story suggestions they never would have found on their own. Some of these story ideas will be dreck and some will be invaluable. It will be up to the newspaper's editors to find the (rare) nuggets in the huge pile of dross they will need to sort through every day, and up to the newspaper's reporters to follow up on them.

There's a lot in there, so do read the whole thing.

update: (Dec 2, 2020 -0500) Found on the venerable beep (hat tip: Ria):

Blogs reflect power of the pen: The continuing growth of blogging has changed the way journalists think about their work, argues technology analyst Bill Thompson. And it is for the better.

So much so that the students of Bill Thompson at his online journalism class at City University are all asked to blog:

And of course having to write a blog entry as part of their coursework forces students to read the papers, look around websites and generally take an interest in what is happening with new media, something I want to encourage.

But the real point of getting a journalist blogging at this early stage in his or her career is that the bloggers, in all their variety, with all their different skills and abilities and interests and biases, are reshaping the world in which professional journalists operate just as much as the telephone shook up the profession in the first half of the 20th Century.

He has a lot more to say--about fact checking, about engaging with the readers, about getting used to being harshly criticised and dissected by those who disagree, about Flickr and other photo sharing sites, and so on. But the last part is especially telling:

The growth of internet use and the emergence of easy-to-use publishing tools could well be the best thing that has happened to journalism since radio and then television offered new ways to reach people, but that requires a certain degree of modesty and a great willingness to learn on the part of a profession that is not noted for either attribute.

Read the whole thing.