More Portland neighborhoods going on line

Last Thursday evening nearly 40 neighborhood activists jammed into the Lovejoy conference room in Portland City Hall.

We weren’t there to lobby or petition, but to learn.

The lessons were about the Internet, and our teachers were experienced neighborhood web masters and web mistresses.

From the numbers in the room, it’s clear a lot more neighborhoods are going to be on line soon, adding to the growing glut of information—all of it competing for your attention.

Whether the content qualifies as “news” is another question.

The sites will certainly will be part of what has been awkwardly called “hyper-local” journalism.

The audiences, accordingly, will be relatively minuscule. And the journalists are bound to be amateurs, if for no other reason that there is no money in this. Minuscule markets mean minuscule advertising revenues.

But, like teachers, few journalists enter the field for the money. And a few of us who are semi-retired are willing to work for nothing or next to nothing. The rewards are a job well done, not big bank accounts.

On Thursday we were shown several neighborhood web offerings, some obviously better than others, but each had a lesson for would-be hyper-local journalists like me.

Links to several neighborhood sites follow. Check them out. They are a mixed bag. I’ll leave it to you to sort them out. Feel free to comment. As someone about to launch two neighborhood-oriented sites, I'd like to know your likes and dislikes.

Sullivan’s Gulch
Mt. Tabor
Woodstock
Eastmoreland
Bridlemile
Laurelhurst
Hillsdale

Funds awarded for Hillsdale web sites

Two city-funded grants announced last week will allow me to move ahead with web sites for the Hillsdale Alliance and the Hillsdale Business and Professional association (HBPA).

The grants, awarded through Southwest Neighborhoods Inc (SWNI) and the Alliance of Portland Neighborhood Business Associations (APNBA), total $2500.

Based on my experience of less than three months with The Red Electric, building readership is key. The Red Electric is averaging 11 visitors a day, not bad for a start-up, but nothing like what I'm used to.

Last week my colleagues at the Hillsdale Book Club helped me find what I hope will be a solution. It is related to the way I distributed The Hillsdale Connection. After a couple of false starts, I put the monthly out on stands where people could see it and let them decide whether to pick it up. Now many get The Connection in the mail as well and have the choice of reading it. I suspect most do.

So the new web sites will be actively promoted, and readers will have the choice of getting a weekly digest and summary newsletter in their e-mail in-boxes. A click on items listed in the newsletter will take them directly to the web sites.

Of course the content for the new sites will not range as widely as The Red Electric's.

I hope to continue this site as a personal commentary page.

I plan to have both new sites and the weekly electronic newsletter up and running no later than June.

I'll keep you informed on my adventures on the learning curve.

As always, I welcome suggestions.

Rick

Print journalists will find a Web home

Writing in the current issue of the Columbia Journalism Review, Mitchell Stephens, a professor of journalism at NYU and author of “A History of News,” argues that for print journalism to survive it can no longer compete with on-line journalism in covering news.

What newspapers can and must do, he argues, is provide dot-connecting, insightful analysis, and yes, informed opinion.

In short, print must be, in his words, “informed,” “interesting,” “intelligent,” “industrious” and “insightful.”

His recommendation is commendable but flawed as a cure for what ails print. Clearly on-line journalism already offers journalism steeped in the same “Five I”’s. Print does not own the franchise.

Certainly, as Stephens points out, print journalism is dying in part because it can no longer match the speed of on-line journalism. But print’s core problem is that the new technologies are cheap (as in free) and flexible. They are also readily and easily available. As a result, we are becoming acculturated and even conditioned to turn to them.

Instead of going out to gather in newspapers each morning, we routinely log on to computers—often laptops—and increasingly to mobile phones.

Where these convenient, multi-media information portals lead us is often where we choose to go, not where some distant editors decide to take us. The choice is ours: We are free to reinforce our biases—at our peril, by the way—or easily seek out new, challenging views.

And we can go to just about any depth of information we desire, all at the click of a mouse.

Lastly, if writing and reporting in the new media isn’t informed, industrious, interesting, intelligent and insightful, it simply won’t be read.

If Stephens persuades newspapers that their salvation is primarily in much needed news analysis and opinion, ultimately he will be doing readers of both old and new media a favor. As newspapers shrink and wither away, their unemployed but insightful, interesting, informed, industrious and intelligent journalists will find themselves right at home on the web.