Advertising Agency Starts Local, Online Newspaper

[Brad King]

I'm interested in what the brain trust thinks about this article I saw posted on a Wired Journalist blog.

The story brief is this: a local weekly closed shop so an advertising agency put up a site, contracted with citizens to blog, the ad group edits the work and complaints go directly to the writers.

Other than that, there's apparently no oversight or intervention.

Thoughts?

[John Borland]

A couple of thoughts. The other blogger's comment:

---snip----
Still, if a bunch of armchair psychologists started up a site dedicated to giving mental health advice or a group of unordained Catholicism enthusiasts started offering religious guidance, people would be completely up in arms.
---snip---

...seems entirely off base. Psychology and religion are bad metaphors for what we do. Their goals are different. (Ostensibly) healing people and getting people into heaven.

We tell people what's happening. It's a bad idea to start telling people who the media can be. That leads to Official Media, and ultimately state media that tell you what it wants you to hear.

But there is a potential problem with this. Assuming that there isn't much hyper-local media in town (since the weekly folded), there probably isn't much in the way of competition. Granted, most publishers are in one way or another an ad agency, with an interest in seeing the advertisers served. But this is like having a newpapers' ad sales team be the editors. Potential for conflict of interest is very high.

In theory, shitty or slanted reporting should fail in the marketplace. People simply won't consume it. In practice, that's probably not true. If the ad agency puts some fun stuff in the paper, and then some slanted stuff as well, it might survive. It's possible people will discount anything that's slanted, or treat the paper for what it is -- an advertising conduit in which the reporting is unimportant. Lots of local weeklies are this anyway; in my neighborhood in Berlin, I have two local weeklies with very marginal copy, which largely exist to carry the ads.

So yeah. Problematic. But not so bad that I'd say it shouldn't be done. I'd hope people would recognize that the reporting was bad if it is, or credible if it turns out to be. People will ultimately decide in a market system.

Should it be replicated on a wide scale, with big-city papers run by ad agencies, without editors. I'd have a much more serious problem there.

[Elizabeth Naramore]

I've also been thinking about this quandary social media will have with spreading information while not spreading misinformation at the same time. Perhaps this is another obstacle for old school newspaper execs - this whole idea of "I read it on the Internet so it MUST be true " feel, where anybody can print anything they like and if they have even one person believe it, then they've accomplished something.

I also wonder about the copyright issues. Who owns the copyright in that case?

And what if one of the writers decides to completely slander someone else, won't the advertising agency also get sued?

I agree with John; I don't think we're ready for a free-for-all news outlet like this, without any checks and balances on the information being dispersed. Allowing the general public to offer up movie reviews or reviews of restaurants is one thing. Relying on them to paint a complete and factual picture of what's going on in the community around them is a completely different story. It might be alright on a small community level, but having this extend to a city-level would be a scary thing.

[Brad King]

I don't disagree with any of the points in principle, but I would argue that newspapers do a very poor job of painting an accurate and factual picture of a town. Increasingly, Associated Press wire stories fill the pages of our local papers, community papers are poorly written and edited (and underfunded) and the one daily in town (not just Cincinnati, Austin had a similar problem) is often completely ill-equipped to handle any real coverage of issues outside of city hall and government entities.

I don't think a free-for-all is the way to go, obviously, but I think there's a way to facilitate that in a meaningful way.