 I want to welcome our audience to the first of our forums for this semester. You can see the others listed on the screen there. I want to urge those of you who have not yet signed up for the communications forum mailing list to do so. We use our mailing list very sparingly, only to notify people who have signed in about our events and very occasionally about other events that are in our ballpark or to be interesting to our constituency. The list is never used for any other purpose. I'm very pleased and excited about today's forum, which pursues a topic which the forum has been concerned with for a number of seasons and a topic that continues to be of critical importance to the welfare, I think, to the intellectual welfare of the country, the state of local news, and what's happening more broadly to journalism because of the profound impact of digital technologies. My task is a simple one. It's to introduce your moderator who will carry the burden of the forum on his broad shoulders and damaged elbow. Dan Kennedy is an assistant professor of journalism at Northeastern University and the sole owner and proprietor of the Media Nation blog, which I'm finding more and more as one of my favorite destinations for intelligent commentary about journalism and politics. He is now completing a book about online local news sites with a focus on the New Haven Independent, a nonprofit project. The book is tentatively titled The Wired City and will be published by the University of Massachusetts Press. Dan Kennedy. Well, thank you. Thank you so much for coming, everybody. It's great to see this audience here. And we have a large hall, as you can see. So don't be shy about moving closer to the front if you feel like you'd like to come down and get a better look, especially with some of the websites we're displaying on the screen. Earlier this year, the FCC issued a report titled The Information Needs of Communities, The Changing Media Landscape in a Broadband Age. And I understand that the highlights of the report were distributed to you on your way in. And it's well worth taking a look at, even though I would take issue with some of it. And I think that some of our speakers might take issue with some of it as well. But nevertheless, there are some stark statistics in there that you really can't take issue with. 13,400 newspaper jobs have been lost over the last four years, which is really a significant percentage of the reporting base that we had for doing public interest journalism in cities and towns across the country. The newspaper business, traditionally, has been supported by advertising, as we know. And online advertising on newspaper websites nationally grew by $716 million between 2005 and 2009. So happy days are here again. Not quite. That figure was more than offset by the loss of $22.6 billion in print advertising. One of the reasons that we are starting to see newspapers trying to charge for online access, and I think we'll probably hear a little bit about that this evening, is that online advertising has really amounted to pennies compared to the print dollars that we saw at one time. And finally, as you heard, I do have a special interest in nonprofit news sites. And I do think it is a promising alternative in some cases. But $1.6 billion was cut from editorial spending by news organizations per year over a five-year period while foundations have contributed and estimated $180 million to fund new online ventures over a five-year period. So again, the money that's going into starting some of these nonprofit news sites is absolutely minuscule compared to the money that is being drained out of professional journalism. And yet, as I said, I do think the report is unnecessarily gloomy and that there is reason for optimism. It seems like an explosion of new ventures and experiments are upon us, not just the New Haven Independent, but the Voice of San Diego, the Texas Tribune, Minn Post, small for-profit sites such as the Batavian and Barista Net, which cover their local areas. And the list really goes on and on. We are also seeing a lot of new local coverage here in the Boston area as well. And our All-Star panelists will be speaking to that. Now, what I'm going to do is each of our panelists is going to speak for maybe five minutes or so. And I'm going to introduce them one at a time. So what I am going to do is start with David Dahl, who is the regional editor of the Boston Globe and is in charge of the Globe's Zone Suburban Editions on Thursdays and Sundays and also on Boston.com's Your Town hyper-local websites, which cover many of the towns around Boston and many of the neighborhoods in Boston. It is kind of an interesting juxtaposition for David to be in because, as you probably know, the Boston Globe recently went to a paid website and also a free website. These zoned editions are part of the paid website and the Your Town sites are part of the free website. So he's kind of is involved in both aspects of that. Also, for each speaker, I will have a disclosure. Disclosure number one, some of our students at Northeastern University, including some of my students, contribute to the Your Town sites. And I have some involvement in coordinating with Dave in terms of getting those stories onto the Your Town site. So I have a conflict with all three of our speakers and that's my conflict of interest with Dave. So Dave, you're on. Thank you. It's great to be here. It's great to be here with Dan and Callie and Adam and to see everybody here to talk about something that's a passion of mine. And I think of everybody who's up here on this panel, which is to deliver local news and information to our readers and to our users in greater Boston. The question as posed to me at the outset here was, is local news a casualty of the digital age? And from my standpoint, the answer is an emphatic no. In fact, I think over the last few years, we've seen a huge growth in the number of websites that are covering individual communities around greater Boston. And so what I'm going to do first and foremost is just sort of take a quick little survey through a couple of these. Here in Cambridge, we have the Cambridge Day in Medford. Inside Medford, I just learned about one that I wasn't all that familiar with called Open Media. And of course, we have Universal Hub. And in the radio broadcast area, many TV shows or TV stations have started their own websites. As have the both of the two NPR stations, WBOR and WGBH, both have much greater community presence, not just over the airwaves, but they've started. They've opened up websites and are pretty aggressive in trying to cultivate a community following. And we've noticed that at the Boston Globe and Boston.com, believe me. From my standpoint, I have more feet on the street than I did a few years ago. We have 50 Your Town websites in greater Boston, 17 in the city of Boston, 33 in the suburbs. Staffing that are a system of town correspondence. There are around 10 or 11 young men and women, largely who are writing stories for each one of those and acting as ambassadors in each one of those communities. In addition, the model for our sites is to link to local blogs and to link to content from the Boston Globe and to encourage users to contribute as well. So what this means is we are covering more stories than we were a few years ago. In some cases, these sites have replaced print products that the Globe published. In about two, two and a half years ago, we shut down a print section called City Weekly, which covered Cambridge, Somerville, Boston, and Brookline. And now we have websites for each one of those communities. Are we covering things to the fullest extent that I would like? No. Are we covering things more than we would it be were a few years ago? Yes. So what kinds of stories are we doing? Yesterday, we heard from one of our staffers on driving home that the cops were ticketing bicyclists in Cambridge. There is a vibrant bicycling community in Greater Boston. So we reported it out as we would under any circumstance. And we put the story on our Cambridge site. We also put it on Boston.com. As you can see, it generated 56 comments. We also put it out on our Facebook page. It generated even more comments. This is a story that was very much read by folks in the Greater Boston area and beyond. We have other examples of the sorts of things. In Dorchester, there is a city council race. This is meat and potatoes covers that you would see in a lot of newspapers. But as structured as the Gloucestershire Globe is structured as it was, this story, this District 3 race might get one story in the metro section. We are able to expand upon that, do a Q&A with the candidates. And we're also able to link to other organizations or other news organizations coverage. When you click on that link right there, we're sent to the Dorchester Reporter, which has another take on the race. So this has been largely a success. We can probably talk a little bit more about whether it's been a financial success. I'm turning to you because I know you're making millions of dollars off of this. But we believe that this is essential to our coverage in Greater Boston. We're constantly rethinking it, of course, but it has made us fundamentally a better news organization. And it's connected us and our brand and our people to the community in ways that we were never connected before through all of the social media tools that we all know about through face-to-face contacts with people and through simply covering their communities more closely. Thank you very much, Dave. Our next speaker is a distinguished journalist who was so distinguished, I am not going to possibly be able to get to everything that she has done in her career. But I certainly can mention a few highlights. Callie Crosley is a long-time television producer who is now the host of the Callie Crosley show on WGBH radio, which is at 89.7 FM on weekdays from 1 to 2 p.m. And she is a panelist on Beat the Press, which is a media review and criticism program on WGBH TV Channel 2 on Fridays at 7 p.m. Callie was a producer on Eyes on the Prize, the amazing civil rights documentary. She is a former Nieman Fellow. She continues to work for the Nieman Foundation. She worked for many years for 2020 at ABC News. I know she actually did the reporting on one of my favorite stories from 2020. She frequently appears on National Public Radio, on the PBS NewsHour, and on many other programs. She has received honorary degrees. She was also a fellow at the Institute of Politics at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard. And believe me, I could continue, but I think you would probably rather hear from Callie. Disclosure number two. I'm also a panelist on Beat the Press, and Callie and I are colleagues and friends. So Callie Crossley. Thanks, Dan. So I would like to know in this audience how many of you are regular local news viewers, readers, whatever. Okay, so this is a biased audience. Good. Just want to know. Because when I asked that question in my other groups, which I started to do leading up to this talk, that's not the sort of response that I get. I get people saying, well, I kind of sort of maybe read it. At night I might watch local news, but pretty much they reflect something of the bias against local news that I think has happened over a period of time. That's changing now, I will say, but I think it's changing. A lot of people hold in their minds that it's just boring and bad. One person said to me, it's animal abuse and salacious murders. And I'm just really not that interested. So I said, well, I think it's a little bit more than that, but okay. But I'm just saying that that local news has often gotten a bad rap. And so I think what's happened when local news has been put in this digital age and people are finding their way to it because of their interest in what's going on around them. And sadly I also think because some of the larger organizations stopped covering it at the level down here. They may cover a little bit up here, but down here, you don't hear about it or see about it maybe as much as you might have at one point. And so that's given an opportunity for a lot of folks. I know Adam will speak about that more carefully a little bit after me. But I think that that is the reason why some people are coming back to local news and finding their way back there even though they may not know that that's what has happened. So a little bit of context about myself. I mean, from the beginning I was going to have to be a person that sought out local news in a different way. So I never expected mainstream media to be the answer for me. That's not what happened in my household. Both my parents are black, I'm black. We knew our story not in there. So where are you going to go get? Where are you going to look for it? Are you going to look for those local institutions, those people that really know the stories in your neighborhood to tell you that. Here in Boston I turn to some of those institutions. I have someone who's helping me. I don't know how this works. Should I say that? Oh, there you are. Okay. I'm just going to pop up a few because I don't assume that people know anything about what may be out there or not. You let me know when you're ready. Okay. So one of the ones I might turn to is the Bay State Banner. Is that up? So this is a long time publication here in Boston. It's gone through many iterations. It still exists. It's now edited by a journalist who has worked in many institutions here in Boston, including the Globe, the Herald, and Howard Manley. And so they cover the issues that are of concern to African Americans in the community. And they do it pretty straightforward. They also may pull in some national pieces that have some impact on what's going on locally. Another publication I might turn to is El Planeta. El Planeta is going to come up here in Spanish, but you can also click on it and get it in English because they're covering the Latino population. For me, there's a big cross between African American and Latino populations. I'm interested in what's going on there. And then you keep drilling down on this local. And we're going to talk about the difference between local and hyperlocal. You're going to get to sites like Black Bostonian. And this is a guy similar to Adam, who's just like all about the African American communities. He's a little edgy. That's the term I'd use. But be that as it may, he's really interested in politics. So you'll see a lot of political stuff. And nine times out of ten, see stuff there that I just would not see anyplace else. And he manages to get people to say some things on the record, possibly because they don't know, I think, the extent by which some of their comments can be out into the world because it's digital. So that's to put that on the table. It's really important to me to have some other places to get the whole story. I was going to have to do that anyway because I knew from the beginning. I don't think that's an assumption that a lot of people made. I think a lot of folks thought, I'm getting everything I need if they were into local news from their local big institution, whatever that may be. And it's become clear as people made their way out into the cyberspace that there were other opportunities to find out information they may not have had access to before. So I talked to one friend and she said to me, you know, one of the things I like to do is follow the Cambridge police site. And then I check it against what stories may be, maybe what David has done in your town to see how that story came out. So maybe with the arrests of those bicyclists, she probably went back and read the police report of what happened. She said, that way I can get the original source and I can get this. I said, well, now you're kind of nerdy. I'm not sure everybody's doing that. But that's an opportunity. If you want to go that way, you can do that. And so I think that in a way just speaks to the expansion of what happens in the digital age with local news. I wanted to talk about an experiment that is not now an experiment. It's really, it's a real thing happening, but it started as an experiment by a friend of mine who does not live here. But this is what we have seen happening in terms of folks who are turning to the reporting of their communities. You know, we can argue about the definition of a reporter and I have, believe me, on Beat the Press a lot. And we may also have a conversation about what reporting looks like. And there are some things in that FCC report which suggest that reporting, as we may have defined it originally, is not happening now. That there's more information out there. There's more sites. There's more local sites. But are there gaps in what you may or may not be getting about what's going on locally at City Hall, at the State House, that kind of stuff? Where it's not happening, I can tell you, is in McLean, Virginia. Where a friend of mine in February 2009 said to me quite enthusiastically, she had reduced her full-time job. She worked at the, interestingly enough, the American Society of Newspaper Editors. Was working in administration, had a long-time career as a journalist, including a stint at the Washington Post. She said, I really miss journalism. Being on the ground, I want to get back out there. And I said, what are you going to do? She said, I'm going to do a website in McLean, Virginia, in my little community, called the McLean Ear. Would you put up that first one for me? It's up? Great. And I said, oh, and I said, what's driving you that? She said, McLean is so interesting. We got everybody there. We got Dick Cheney, and then we got the lady that bakes this great bread. I just love my little community, just my community. I said, is that going to sell? She said, nobody's covering it. She was watching the Post, and I worked there. She said, at one time they did it, but nobody's covering it, and there's a lot going on here. She said, did you know that McLean is the single largest neighborhood for CIA agents? No, I did not know that. I said to her, Bobby. She said, well, it is. And I said, oh. And she said, so there's all kinds of interesting stuff here. I want to do it. So she was preparing to do that, as she was easing out of AS&E work, and was taking her time. She had hired a guy to build a website for her. She's building it, building it, building it. And finally, she was pushed off into starting this web blog because something happened in the community, and she thought, this is exactly the kind of story that's going to not only resonate with people, but really underscores why we need local attention at the neighborhood level. And it was a story about the library closing in McLean, Virginia. Now, understand, as she's given me these stats, there are 80,000 people with master's degrees or some ridiculous number in McLean, Virginia, and they make all kinds of money. It's very affluent. It's one of the most affluent communities in the United States. So the fact that they're going to shut down the library in McLean doesn't even make sense. What they had done in other communities surrounding them is when they shut down the library, they would then open up a temporary one. But they were very stealthily just saying, we're closing it down, but no temporary site was noted. She found that out. She said, I got to get this out. So she threw this up, and that's what jumped started the web blog. Well, it's up, and it's going. I got so much response from people because they wanted to know what was going on in the neighborhood. That after she got going for a while, then she updated it to the next one. And the next one was the website that she had intended to build, which was now the McLean Ear website. It's just her, though. One person. She's working like a dog. Adam will speak to you about that. She's covering everything, but she was so excited about it. And that went on until she stayed about four months into it. She realized she'd hit a wall. I really want to do this. I love it. This is the best job I've had as a journalist. But I now don't know anything about business. I know nothing about business. And I have to now go somewhere to support this. So what am I going to do? So she said I was going to have to try to talk somebody into doing advertising for me, or being my advertising manager, or whatever. And she was pondering that, and how would this work, and blah, blah, blah. When, lo and behold, here comes Patch. So Patch comes in, and they say, hey, we like what you're doing. Why start again? Why would you be interested in converting the McLean ear into Patch? And you can pop up Patch if you haven't already. And so now what was the McLean ear is the McLean Patch, and she's the editor of it. And she loves it. She said to me, I want to just tell you, it's the greatest thing. I get a little bit more help. She said it's still very tough, because we hire freelancers, and it's hard to hire freelancers to do breaking news, which is the news that often is not getting covered as well. So she said, I end up doing a lot of that. Feature stuff I can always have happen. So she told me two stories about doing this, which really, I think, speaks to what local news can be on either end of the spectrum. She said, I'm sitting having my coffee, a woman comes over to me. She said, my dog is lost. Okay, she said, aren't you the editor of the Patch? She said, yeah. So she said, hey, that's what we do. We put it up. Dog lost, blah, blah, blah, blah. Got lots of feedback dog found. So, you know, we've responded to the community. On 9-11, here on the opposite end of the spectrum, she said, I think I should do something that's relative to our community again, that makes sense. We have the counter-terrorism department in McLean, Virginia. Nobody knows why it's there. How it got there. So I thought I'll do a story on it, and I call the guy up. How did you get here? What's going on? He says, no comment, CIA. So she manages to get herself in there, to talk to the PR person. Why don't know why they have one. Why are you here? You know, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And I've discovered that, you know, you don't own this land. So who are you renting from? No comment. So she goes online, and she starts piecing together the Google Maps from the this and that. She figures out where the commercial, it's a commercial building owner, and talks to them, pieces it all together, puts it out to the community. Here's how they got here. Here's the history of the counter-terrorism department in McLean. One of the people that responded to her story, the guy at the CIA. Interesting story, he says. That was really good. So anyway, her point is, whatever happens in my neighborhood, I consider I am doing neighborhood reporting, everything from the lost dog to the CIA report. And she said, this is where I believe local news is going, and I can tell by the engagement of my community that people are really interested in this. So that's that. Now, let me wrap up with what we're doing on the radio show. We wanted to take that kind of spirit, that kind of interest at the very hyper-local level and local level, because they're mean different things, and turn that into a radio conversation every day. And we are looking for those stories locally that are organic in nature. They come from the community. There's not something that happens nationally that I can make local, because I can do that too. You know, the big study comes out and I can make it local, or I can try to find out what's happening at every neighborhood level. Today I did the Fluff Festival in Somerville. I love that story. I'm wearing the fluff button. So I can do everything like that, including the Dorchester Race that we were talking about, that David was talking about. I've done two candidate roundtables of an hour each with featuring every single candidate running. That's just not something you get anywhere anymore. It's not a debate. I'm not interested in having them fighting. I'm interested in them expressing what they stand for, what they're going to do, and talking with each other. All of my candidate roundtables have gotten a great amount of response, not just from the people in those neighborhoods. Certainly that's gotten response, but from others as well. So that's what I mean by local. That's why I think it's important. I think the growth is important. One of the things that we have to keep in mind is it's more work for us as individuals to get out there and get it off, and it's not just going to come to you. You're going to have to go look for it. And maybe it starts with an understanding that local news is important and not boring and not just abused animals and salacious murders. But I think that we are offering a lot, and there are many more outlets to do so. So the digital age and local news are a match made in heaven. Thanks, Callie. I think we'll probably explore the difference between local and hyper local a bit as we move on. But it's interesting that Callie makes a distinction. It seems to me, at least from my perspective, that maybe 10 years ago hyper local was a word that was kind of reserved to describe neighborhood or almost street level news and information where local news might be more about an entire community. It seems that these days the terms are used interchangeably and I think it would be useful if we get back to making some sort of distinction. But I think we'll be talking about that a little more. Our third panelist is Adam Gaffin, who is a professional journalist, who worked in community journalism early in his career as a reporter for what is now the Metro West Daily News after many permutations based in Framingham. But of more relevance to this discussion, Adam is the co-founder, publisher, and editor of universalhub.com where he posts the newsy, the funny, and the just plain weird. Adam does amazing work keeping on top of what's going on at something like a thousand blogs in eastern Massachusetts and linking to what he thinks are the best and most important and funniest posts. And here is my disclosure number three. My blog Medianation is part of the Boston Blogs ad network that Adam set up a few years ago. And he also handles the technical aspects of helping me get ads onto my site. So we're both getting fabulously wealthy and I have Adam to thank for this. Thank you. Since this discussion is about an FCC report, I have a couple of comments about that first. It was an interesting report, kind of depressing as somebody who's had a lot of friends lose their jobs. I lost my job myself although I wasn't in local media anymore. But I think there was a fundamental problem with that report. The report comes from the assumption that newspaper organizations are the only people that can do local reporting and that they are the only people that should continue to do local reporting. Sort of like around 1900 when buggy makers, if they had gotten the, whatever the equivalent of the FCC was back then, to talk about the problems in the buggy industry. I think we are seeing a fundamental transformation in how local news is covered and consumed and it's an amazing transformation. But with any transformation there is pain. You know, people are losing their jobs, there are gaps in coverage. But there's also a lot of ferment as Dan mentioned. You know, there are ways, there are experiments coming up. And I think ultimately we're going to see some really fascinating stuff. One of the things, one of the things that's really changing universal hub over the last couple of years is, although I still do follow, God knows how many blogs in the Boston area, RSS aggregation is a wonderful thing. I'm doing more of what is sort of like news' conversation. Doing a lot more breaking news now than I would have a couple of years ago. I'm not just reporting on, you know, a couple bloggers went out to some dinner and they reviewed the restaurant kind of thing. Everybody now is a mini newsroom on two legs essentially. Everybody has a camera. Everybody has, you know, a Twitter account. And when the red line collapses, as it does roughly once a week, everybody gets on their phones and they tweet help. I'm stuck under Park Street or help Park Street's on fire or whatever. You know, so it's not like we're limited anymore to a small but dedicated staff of reporters covering the news. And this picture is an example of what's going on. It was like two in the morning, I think, in Dorchester. You know, who's up at two in the morning except firefighters and some odd people with cameras? There's a fire report comes in on the street in Dorchester. Firefighters get there. There's a car parked in front of the Hydra. What do you do? You can't write it a ticket. You know, the building might be on fire. So look what they did. They stuck the hose. They broke the windows and they stuck the hose through and they put out the fire. Somebody was there. They took the picture. They put it up on, not Twitter, but Twitter pic or one of those things and then they tweeted about it. Somebody let me know about it. I put that up. You know, this started a whole long discussion on my side. People were talking about it on Twitter. You know, this is user-generated news. Twitter is an amazing tool for that. You know, if something happens, like I said, somebody's going to tweet about it. You know, I can't be everywhere at once. This is where this comes in. If I don't know something, I will tweet it. In fact, Callie, just today, I guess it was an experiment or something, there's a McDonald's in Brighton. She wants to know why are they tearing it down. So she tweeted, she added me on Twitter. So I don't know. I retweeted Callie's thing and sure enough, somebody said maybe it has to do with this new apartment complex that's going in, but then McDonald's of Eastern Massachusetts who even knew they had a Twitter account, you know, they respond. So it's like this conversation. It's all of a sudden news is no longer one news organization talking to lots of people. It's everybody talking to everybody else. That doesn't mean that there's no role for professional journalists and I think, you know, all these people on Twitter are acting as reporters. They're reporting in this sort of bubble around them what's going on, but you still need somebody to act as a filter. You still need somebody to make sense of it and I think that's where we're going to see the amazing opportunities of the future where you have somebody who is doing this stuff full-time who can filter this out, you know, let people know what's going on around their world. Now, if you figure out how to pay for the investigative reporting that the globe does and the enterprise reporting, that's an awesome thing and who knows maybe it'll happen here in Boston. Adam, thanks a lot. I have prepared a bunch of questions. I can see that I won't get through more than a few of them before I turn the conversation over to the audience, which is a good thing, but what I would like to do is I do have one question for each of the three of you, but I hope that all of you will feel that you can chime in if you have something to add to it and I'd like to start with a question for Dave. You have talked about the difficulty of finding a business model to pay for the explosion of local coverage that we're now seeing. I'm wondering if we ought to be concerned that as giants like the New York Times Company, which owns the globe, Gatehouse Media, AOL's Patch and others battle it out trying to extract limited dollars from local business communities, is there going to be no place for interesting independent sites? I'm wondering if this is a matter of corporate chains trying to monopolize the local conversation just as we've seen for a generation or two with the gobbling up of local newspapers, only this time with a different technology? Well, very good question. I have a couple of theories. I don't know the answers. I think different markets will respond in different ways. I think that there are still, first of all, I'll say I'm a journalist. I don't know anything about newspaper business except that I think over the last four or five years all of us in this industry have become much, much more familiar with what one of my colleagues referred to as ROI. I said we need to be tweeting more. She said what's the ROI? Which is the return on investment. And I realized that we had crossed some sort of line there where one of my reporters is talking about how are we going to make money off of this whereas several years ago we would be talking about tweeting more or covering more stories or doing something like that. I believe that there are add dollars to be had at this level. I also believe that no one has particularly perfected how to get those dollars. The flavor of the year seems to be daily deals and deal sites. We're playing in that space. I don't know if you all are, but I know many, many other news organizations are and websites are. It's another way to connect users and merchants. So maybe that's going to be successful or maybe it'll be some other model. One of the things that I've kind of come away with over the last several months and several years is that each one of these small business owners are members of their communities. And so one way we need to sort of think about this is that it's as much a sort of a marketing and outreach function when news organization or website or whatever the outlet is is selling ads to a merchant. It's as much a revenue generator. Of course, that's crucial to the long-term health of the operation, but it's as much that as it is a sort of an outreach function to the people in that community. That same pizza shop owner or shoe store owner or whatever is also the little league coach or involved in a local faith community, et cetera, et cetera. And so I think the key here is going to be how news organizations bring those folks into the boat. To the specific question, Dan, I'm sort of a moderate. I think that in some ways some news organizations are going to borrow from what we're learning from independence. I think that some news organizations, big news organizations, AOL Patch maybe, will ultimately pull out of this, pull out of the hyper local space. I think that, but I don't think that this is going to go away. I think we've identified a demand for local news and I think now what we're trying to do is figure out what the model is. Adam, same question, but let me frame it a little bit. Debbie Galant, who is the co-founder of BaristaNet, one of the best known independent local sites in the country, recently formed an alliance called Authentically Local and it's been joined by some of the best known independent sites in the country, including the New Haven Independent, including the Batavian. And she's pretty worried about Patch and you could, it's Patch in her area, but you could, in this area you could say Patch plus Wicked Local plus your town. Are the folks that you deal with, are the folks that you aggregate and point to, are they scared or are they saying, you know, I really could have done more but it doesn't really make any sense with these big players coming into my backyard. It's an interesting question. Boston Market is actually a very interesting and almost in some ways undeveloped market for online advertising, hyper-local advertising. We're not Seattle where they have full-time people selling ads now for hyper-local, their blog sites. We've never really developed that so that the folks that I'm dealing with are not, they're not in it for the money. They're doing it because they enjoy writing, they enjoy covering their community. In fact, there's a very good site in the North End called North End Waterfront News which is run by a guy in his spare time. He doesn't want to have anything to do with advertising. He's just doing it for the love of covering his community. He does a great job at it. So it hasn't been the same kind of issue that she's worried about where she's doing it full-time or where in Seattle, for example, like the West Seattle blog where it's a husband and wife and one just does advertising full-time. That having been said, I don't think I'm not particularly concerned about the globe and patched stomping on me. If you go back even 20 years before the web, there's never really been a monopoly of newspapers in this market. You've always had weekly papers that have managed to survive and thrive. South End News, Dorchester Reporter, it's a whole series of sort of like alternative and smaller media outlets that have somehow managed to make money despite this 800-pound gorilla that's constantly coming after them. And I think you're seeing the same thing online, that there are opportunities. I think the problem for a lot of us is that we're journalists. We come to this as reporters. I don't have no business sense whatsoever. When we do our taxes, my wife has to double-check it because invariably I make a mistake. So we need to get better at that like they are doing in Seattle. Can I add something to this? Yes, please do, Kelly. With regard to Patch and my friend, Bobby Bowman, who runs the McLean Patch that was one time her own web blog called McLean Ear. I asked her the question. I said, you come from a very strong journalism background and you really, really knew this community. So when I go to journalism conferences, Patch is hiring everywhere. So this is different from hiring somebody and bringing them in to know all the nooks and crannies. And she said, no, that's a totally different thing. I said, I can see the success that McLean Patch would have that my own Belmont Patch, and for some reason I get it all the time, they're like off the mark many times because I don't know the who the person is doing it, but I know it doesn't drill down to the extent that she's doing it at this point. Though it's getting better, got to say. I keep watching it, it's getting better. So where I think they could turn the tables and have an advantage is if they stop just hiring broadly in this way, but really go to those communities and maybe try to get your North End guy or try to reach out, then I think something else happens. And I just wanted to point out that the CEO of AOL made a comment about Patch this week. He was speaking at a conference and he said, they intend to spend about $160 million. This is Tim Armstrong. And he says, we are looking for the local online advertising. And remember I told you, my friend Bobby said, I can't deal with the same thing. Can't deal with the advertising. Don't know what's going on. I said, I've looked at the advertising on your site. Do you know what's on there? No, she says to me. So I said, well, you got Nordstroms. You've got a lot of local stuff. She said those are the people who are, the Patch people are going to get it. Mr. Armstrong says the fact that Google acquired the restaurant review firms Zagat this earlier this month, maybe Zagat, is a proof point that local is really important. So the focus for them will be on local and regional advertisers. That's where they're going. And he says, now a lot of major Fortune 500 companies are coming to us. So we'll see how this goes in terms of the business model of it, but that's where they're going, at least at this point. And I must say this for Patch, because it's, a lot of the independence tend to beat up on them. And a lot of us are wondering what their business model really is. But I'll give them this. Those Patch editors work their butts off. Last spring, I was trying to upload some sort of an announcement about our Boy Scout troop to our local Patch site. And I sent an email to the local editor, figuring I might hear from her the next day. It's like 11 at night, and she's guiding me through it. I mean, it was really quite remarkable. And they've developed some pretty slick tools for doing that too. So I give them credit for that. I have a question for Callie. But again, I'm hoping that all of you might have something to say about this. Public stations such as GBH, public radio stations such as WGBH, are actually threatened with extinction by technology. In a very few years, there'll really be no need for terrestrial radio stations in order to hear, morning edition, all things considered, and other national programming. I imagine that WGBHs and WBURs push into local programming is a way of anticipating and counteracting that challenge. But do you think that interest in local news and public affairs is such that listeners can be enticed into tuning into what you're doing rather than just tuning into NPR via satellite or Wi-Fi or whatever it will be? I do. And I can say that I'm looking at the interest that we get from people who are responding now. Again, if you understand in the digital space that pretty much you, the consumer, have to get out there yourself and find something. I mean, I might stumble across something while I'm looking for something else. But if I'm really interested in local news and I want to go to those sites that can answer the question, I put the question on Universal Hub or where else, then I've got to put some initiative out there. And I think for those people who really are hungering for what is going on in my neighborhood, in my community, then they will seek it out. And if we've done a good job in trying to do those stories that speak to that and are not sort of a watered down national story, we really have paid attention to what's organic. And I get a lot from my contributors. Adam's going to be on my show tomorrow. I mean, we started off on my show making a space weekly for a kind of conversation about local news that has to do with the people that are producing it, that come from the small papers, that come from the small online ventures because we're interested in that. And so are our listeners. So I think as long as there's interest in what's going on in your neighborhood, and again, I look around and see, people are interested in their neighborhood. I think that interest, in effect, I think it's grown because you can't find it casually as you may have been able to do in the past. You know, back when WBUR kind of had the feel to itself, it seemed that every time they developed a great new local show, their next step was to turn it into a national show so that they could get money from other radio stations. Has the thinking in public radio changed? Is that not as successful a model today as it was maybe 10 years ago? I think it depends on the show. And I think that when WBUR was the only game in town for this, it made sense for them because they want to have their programs a part of the listings of national NPR shows and available, and that would draw other listeners to them. When GBH decided to make this move to make an all-talk format on 89.7, they had to look at, well, what are the options available? Do you want to repeat trying to just have all national NPR? That was a choice, could do that. But as Adam has said, there's so much going on here that we could talk about. So why not try a local show? And why not try a local talk show that doesn't mimic some of the features that people find annoying on a local commercial talk show? So that, you know, one of the huge things I hear every day is, you allow people to finish the sentence, to finish their thought. I get a chance to hear what's going on and that's the kind of conversation that we want to create on the Cali Crossley show every day. We want people to talk. That's not that I'm not going to challenge you, but I want you to get your thought out. And that, I think, makes a difference for a lot of people. Great. Now, that was kind of a radio specific question, but let me broaden this out a bit to get Adam and Dave involved in this. You know, back before reading online was as common as it is today, there was a phenomenon called the New York Times Effect. And the way that the New York Times Effect is described is that when a region would suddenly get the national edition of the New York Times made available in their area and you could get home delivery of it, you would start to see an increase in knowledge about national and international affairs and a concomitant decrease in knowledge about local affairs because people who were most interested in the news just didn't care about local news as much as they did national and international news. I guess I'm wondering, do you still detect something of a bias against local news as you try to engage in local conversations on your sites? For me, I can't really answer that question because all I do is local stuff. So I have a sort of self-selecting audience. The very name of my site is a Boston in-joke. Nobody out west of Worcester gets that joke. You know, so I'm... Sad. I'm going specifically for the kind of people who would care about local news and I'm sure there are tons of people who don't care about what the Boston School Committee does, even in the city of Boston. But, you know, there's enough spaces infinite on the web so hopefully they'll find something else they're interested in. You know, you don't abandon basic journalism and basic reporting for this. You're still trying to find stories that are interesting to a broad range of people. That's one of the reasons I'm personally interested in really strange, quirky stuff. And again, I may be a self-selecting audience, but there seems to be people out there who like that kind of weird stuff to balance out all the murders and horrible murders and crimes and all that kind of stuff. And Dave? With Adam. I mean, I'm so immersed in local... I don't see a bias against what we're doing. I think people love our stories and love what we're doing. I think the globe has, you know, I'm not familiar with every single strategic driver in this, but it's clearly repositioned itself over the last five or ten years. We closed down some international bureaus. We still have a very robust national report from our Washington Bureau, but we have focused more and more on what is important to Greater Boston, and that's part of what I'm doing with the print regional sections as well as the sites, and we have plenty of other sections and stories about what's going on in Greater Boston. Okay, terrific. And I think that we can get in one more round before we turn it over to the folks in the audience, and I would like to begin with Adam on this one. You know, a lot of the sites that Universal Hub links to are examples of that much abused term citizen journalism, unpaid enthusiasts who have something to say about where they live. In terms of local news value, I'm wondering, what do you think citizen journalists are good at, and what do you think they're not so good at? And in line with that, what sort of relationship between professional journalism and citizen journalism, would you like to see in Greater Boston that we don't have at the moment? Okay, a couple of things on that. One is I think you're not hearing the term, or at least I'm not dealing with the term citizen journalism as much as it was a few years ago. A few years ago, you know, the big thing was everybody had to have a blog and everybody was covering the neighborhoods and they were spending lots of time doing it. Lisa Williams in Watertown was an excellent example of that. She started out by watching, I think it was city council meetings, you know, at night in her living room and she started reporting on it. It's wonderful. Now, though, again, as I mentioned in the beginning, you know, everybody's reporting about what's going on right around them and I think it's not so much, you know, citizen journalism sounds like people who are dedicated to this thing. It's more like if somebody sees something they're going to write about it but normally they disappear and the question is how do you harness that you know, I personally am fascinated with Twitter so I use that a lot more. I'm sure Facebook you could do the same thing and as I mentioned earlier, you know, there's all these people out there they're reporting these little bits, these sort of atoms of molecules of information. It really still takes somebody to put that all together so that when somebody goes on Twitter at 1030 at night and says I'm in the piano factory in the South End there's all the smoke what's going on, you know, all right, so what's going on so you retweet that and you turn out there's what turns into a nine alarm fire about a mile away in Roxbury all of a sudden everybody's reporting little pieces of that and as a reporter what I was doing was retweeting the you know, the stuff that most people didn't know about yet. You know, it's again news is conversation at the same time you do have to be careful you know, there you don't know what's the validity of some of this stuff. You have to learn to trust your sources just this as you do in a traditional news room but I think the role is to try to bring people who are writing for a living full time together with these both the citizen journalists who still are out there but also just people wandering around, you know doing their 140 characters because something just caught on fire in front of them. Okay, you once spoke to my students and I thought you put it very well at that time. You said that we were talking about a big explosion that took place a few years ago. It was so well known that probably some of you still remember it. It was down the street from me. And I remember what you said at that time is that citizen journalists are very good maybe better than the traditional media at telling you hey, Danversport just blew up. But we still need the traditional media to come in and tell us why Danversport just blew up which I thought was a great way of putting that. Do either Dave or Cali have any reaction to this? Well, what I was going to say is that Lisa Williams, H2O a blog when I stumbled across that I was so excited that was my first you know appreciation of somebody really being focused on a neighborhood I don't live in Watertown I live in Cambridge but I was just fascinated first of all I thought it was such a cute title H2O I thought oh yeah, Watertown I love that I was really interested in her covering some of this mundane stuff and I followed it for a long time and that was at the same time where I had real strong feelings about the use of the term citizen journalism for the reasons you just said even though I don't know why I felt I could trust her maybe because she was doing so many of the mundane things and not just the fun things that one would be available so I know how powerful that can be in a community and of course it's broadened and become different things now and that was my first sort of being brought into the world of citizen journalism at that hyper-local level and I thought it was a fascinating thing and it would definitely be around for a while how it plays out now is very interesting as more and more of these things come together and I think Adam is right somebody has to pull it together and who is the somebody and Dave I wonder regardless of how we define citizen journalism what use or reliance do the your town sites make on whatever citizen journalism that's out there well part of the model is to link to area blogs one of the assumptions going in was that we would be linking to blogs in each and every one of these communities prompted by the Lisa Williams experience what we found is that that's an uneven model of some town some neighborhoods they have lots of blogs some don't and obviously what's occurred in the last few years as Adam says we've gone to Twitter to a large extent and Facebook and you know for other types of distribution models I'm with Adam on this I mean I think that ultimately somebody needs to be a convener you know we're trying to position ourselves as the convener of you know a conversation as well probably with a projection of feed on the street reporting and a little more why and you know using our brand name and the you know the standing that we have in these communities when we've gone in these communities with these sites you know people are delighted that we're paying more attention to them and covering them more fully so Okay terrific well we have come to the end of our first hour and now it's your turn of the auditorium here so we ask that you if you're looking to ask a question that you make use of one of those this is being recorded for online video and if you do not ask your question into the microphone it will be lost for posterity so we do ask you to do that and what I'd also like to ask is that although it's perfectly fine to direct a question at one of our panelists your question is a question that might be directed to one panelist but that can also touch on things that other panelists can talk about so why don't we have at it and it looks like we may be getting off to a slow start here don't be shy but we have a question right over here sir a comment and then a question first of all on the impact of the patch and some of the other chains of local news services I live in central Massachusetts and Main Street Connect is making inroads from suburban New York and ringing the Worcester area they like most other digital enterprises still haven't figured out how to make money patch as we've seen is getting a big infusion of cash from AOL there's a piece on the wire today they're going to target certain areas for profitability with the result that they're still we're all still trying to figure out how to make money so that was the comment the question is you talked about getting a response from the local patch editor at 11 o'clock at night the Herculean efforts that many single reporter editor remember the Al Franken bit where he's standing out in the field satellite dish on his head and Saturday Night Live you know I mean it's come true and so we're reliant on often unmarried young people with lots of stamina lots of Red Bull able to put in these enormous amount of hours at ridiculously low pay I mean journalism has never been paying well but it's still troublesome so is that sustainable are we going to burn people out in a year or two and be left with just kind of digital rubble who would like to take a shot at that Adam that is not that is not new when I was one of those young kids we didn't have Red Bull back then we just had coffee and whiskey lots of whiskey and people's deaths as long as their journalism departments they're going to be kids who want to go into journalism and they're going to work the ridiculous hours and yes they're going to run out because you cannot sustain 60 hours a week especially once you get married and maybe have a kid it's just impossible but then the next generation comes you know journalism has always been like that the one good thing one of the good things about Patch which when I talk to like Dan's class or other classes the first time in six or seven years you can tell these kids hey there's actual jobs out there you don't have to go into public relations you can actually with the proviso that yes you're going to burn yourself out whether Patch's long term is a sustainable business model is probably a different question yeah I would say that some part of that has happened a lot but I have to say that it seems to me that just listening to the Patch stories it's really grueling I mean it's hard hard and I think the editors are very very busy as well but the people who are on the ground doing the stories they're not getting paid very well I mean that's part of the model the editors they really try to recruit well because they need somebody if there's going to be the person collecting the stories or editing the stories they really need somebody with an eye toward knowing what they're doing so in that way then that investment makes sense then if that's the model they're going to go to the sites that are most affluent then what happened with my friend Bobby is right on point in so many ways she was an excellent person she got an aggregate information and we're in McLean, Virginia where as she pointed out to me the three top sellers of news product in her town are the Wall Street Journal well it's for the Wall Street Journal the Washington Post the New York Times and the Economist which is sold in her community at the CVS she said I ask you is there any other place in the country where they're selling the Economist at the CVS no from Patch looked at that and thought this is exactly where we want to be we're going to get she's already getting responses she's got the built in traffic coming and we have some profitability that's a good possibility here in terms of getting some advertising then this is what we may end up with if that's the case then I'm kind of fascinated by the fact that Patch has not come to Cambridge Belmont you know it's kind of interesting to me it's kind of burnt out so something else is going to have to happen they're going to have to figure out ways of particularly if they want if what people are looking for and I think they are is some breaking news combination with the feature stuff they got to put some people on staff to do that and maybe that will happen after they figure out exactly which communities they want to support and did you want to take a shot of that they've made a huge effort to live on is really an open question I think the whole industry is sort of watching this you know the same story that you all pointed out said that they spent 160 million this year now they're talking about focusing on a handful of sites to make them profitable they're in the selection of communities is more toward the Maclean and the Wellesley and the Westons they're not you know they're not in Rossi right so you know they're making some interesting selections we have a different responsibility to all of our readers and we'll see what happens we've been here for a hundred some odd years so let me offer my own response to your question because I want to throw something else on the table here and that is you know one of the crises the absolute collapse of the traditional advertising model in large measure that's what we're talking about tonight so you have news organizations chasing after very scarce ad dollars and that probably isn't going to change in my research and reporting for my book what I found was that the for-profit community sites like Barista net like the Barista net are absolutely scraping to get by the Batavian you've got one guy full-time Howard Owens former top executive for gatehouse media and he's reinvented himself as this local journalist spends you know he's working 12-15 hours a day selling ads covering the news with a little bit of help from his wife and a part-time ad person the Barista net folks they've all got other interests you've got two or three people who are working maybe 20 hours a week a piece not making a lot of money in this world the money at least at the moment is in the non-profit sector the New Haven Independent employs five full-time journalists no one's getting rich but in terms of what community journalists have traditionally made they're doing okay the Connecticut Mirror which is a larger non-profit that covers Connecticut politics and government has 10 or 11 full-time journalists they have the largest Statehouse Bureau in Connecticut now because the Hartford current has cut back so much they have the only Washington reporter of any news organization in Connecticut now the problem with non-profit is wonder will the money run out at some point and I think the challenge I would define the challenge this way there are a lot of non-profits out there I shouldn't say a lot because it's a small movement but there are non-profit news sites out there that are heavily dependent on getting their money from the Knight Foundation which has kind of been the endless source of of money for experimenting with these kinds of non-profit websites instead and again what the New Haven Independent has done what voice of San Diego has done in a very successful way you need to tap into that local foundation community the most important funder of the New Haven Independent is the community foundation for Greater New Haven and you put yourself in the awkward position of competing with programs that serve you know poor families and and the sick and the elderly and people like that but you talk to some of the more enlightened foundation executives and they will tell you that ultimately their whole mission is endangered if there is no decent local journalism to keep the community conversation going and to hold local government and institutions to account so I'm not sure that the advertising model is ever really going to work again on the scale that it used to certainly it's not at the moment I do think that non-profit is not the way to go but a very promising alternative to the to the for-profit model we've got people lining up so let me get right to that you've been very patient sir first off thank you all for the question actually comes out of a interesting situation that arose during the the riots in England at the start of last month I'm not sure if you're aware of this but the greater Manchester police bureau after processing the first wave of people that they arrested during the actual riots they proceeded to engage in what they called naming and shaming of the convicted rioters on Twitter so they went on Twitter and somehow they fit this into 140 characters the names the charges and the sentences of each of these convicted rioters was shared on Twitter which resulted in a lot of sort of talk on the web about whether that was appropriate whether the police were overstepping their bounds and maybe even inciting a retributory violence against the people whose names have been shared there so I guess my question is given that these hyper-local websites are technically speaking just as retrievable and just as accessible as as a site like Twitter considering the fact that the real difference between Twitter and say something like patch is really a question of address and of framing not really a technical difference in how accessible the data is across the world so the question that I have is what are the ethical implications of taking to the web with what might be local information I mean given that the naming of convicted offenders in local police blotters has been a fairly innocuous function of local media for a very long time so how do the ethics change as you take to the web with this local information and also just I'd love to hear your thoughts on this anecdote about what the Manchester Police Bureau did thanks terrific question I can tell you what we do I can give you a little bit of a couple of other examples that I know what other sites and I can tell you that I think you're putting your finger on something that's really kind of interesting and I don't know if we have a solid answer to it right now the position that you know I guess I'm the traditionalist here I think that's pretty fair the position we would the position we would take is that you know a public record is a public record and that so long as it's an accurate depiction of what the police have said or put into their records we would put it into a police blotter online but your very point you know brings up a lot of a lot of concerns about people's reputations and how that lasts forever online the issue often is I was found not guilty where's the story that used to happen still happens in the print side of things but it also happens online or this is still living online how can I get it taken down and you know we deal with that on a case by case basis you know the first line of defenses or defense or first response is of course if it's if it's an accurate depiction of what the core records of the police documents say as to what happened in well let me give one other example here in the U.S. some sites including my former newspaper the St. Petersburg Times have been have been actually publishing booking photos which you know was kind of shocking when they first started doing that a couple of years ago off of Florida has a much broader public records law they can access that material much more easily so that's another you know factoid to throw around obviously you know the culture of that community and of that that state is much more open and in terms of public records and so perhaps it's not as much of a shock as it would be as if that were to start happening here there might be sites that are doing this already here in Massachusetts you know as to you know the other thing with the London police I mean the only thought that I had there is is that it's just fascinating to me the way institutions and police in particular are using Twitter and websites much more you know as Callie pointed out the Cambridge police have their own site you know the Boston police have a Twitter account you know we would expect that but when the Wellesley police department has a Twitter pictures and posts them on a regular basis you know again we've crossed into some new place here you know that what you're describing is as far less innocuous than what I'm describing here not that the crimes that the Boston or Wellesley or Cambridge puts up are innocuous by any means but it sounds like what you're describing is sort of a strategy to embarrass or sort of call out they were I'm not familiar with exactly what happened there Well they were convicted in about three hours over there so I don't think there was much waiting they had to do I've run into the same issue with I mean if it's once it's on the web it's forever this isn't really a local news issue though stuff gets posted on Facebook all the time that probably shouldn't be posted there have been a couple of murders in the South End recently probably out of anger or whatever that in some of the cases they took it down but it's not just something that journalists have to deal with but I have had some cases where it seems like the Boston police like to make examples of people they had there was a case just the other day which I did write about where these two people are charged with breaking into a well going into a 7-11 downtown on the way out they got away with like several bags of rice crispy treats you know it's a stupid story it's the kind of thing you can't not write about but you know one of these guys is 19 and the DA's office sent me their booking photos you know and so what happens when he's 25 now and I have had people email me you know asking it's been several years can you take this thing down and on a case by case basis there's always people with innocuous cases you know somebody's been convicted of like assault and battery with a dangerous weapon they're not they're not emailing me somebody who's been charged with like I had one with a noise complaint you know something like that I'll take it down because it's been five years and it's not like he's going around making noise or whatever but that's you know something everybody has to deal with you just have to be careful about if it's comfortable or it makes me and I don't know why because David has just said it's a public record I mean I could go read it down there I mean why does it sitting up there online seem to say something else and I think perhaps because it is the permanence of it and that if I would go to the police station to look at it that would take some effort on my part more than if I'm just flipping through one night and I know it just I think these are issues we're going to have to work through as they happen but it but a public record is a public record so I'm not quite sure what to do about that what makes concerns me about that particular cases and why the question was asked where they convicted is that in any of those riot situations unless somebody has a camera from eight different angles somebody was probably just standing there I just firmly believe that and then somehow they're caught up in this and they're yelling the wrong thing but they were just standing there I just know that I don't know why I know that but it's probably from years of discovering stuff and it makes me uncomfortable that suddenly they're in a campaign fostered by the police and it's up there forever well there were a public record is a public record but there were public records and there were public records and let me offer an example that we don't really have to do anything with except if let's say 25 years ago if we had had same sex marriage in Massachusetts and there had been a campaign to overturn that and return to the days where we did not have same sex marriage people would have had to sign petitions to get this question on the ballot and if you wanted to see who would sign these petitions you would have to drive into Boston visit the McCormick building behind the state house and go look up the records somewhere it was a lot of work and unless you would brought more quarters than you could possibly carry in your pockets you'd probably be taking notes by hand today things like that are instantly put up online and of course in Massachusetts being opposed to same sex marriage is a very unpopular position so you had a situation a few years ago when people were actually trying to put this measure on the ballot where there were some anti-same sex marriage conservatives who were said that they were getting threatened they were scared and you might say well that's the price of democracy but you end up with a situation in which you may have a chilling effect in which people are very reluctant to sign controversial petitions and for those of us who think that same sex marriage is a good thing you might say well tough but next time it might be your issue or my issue and so it does raise some questions that I don't think we had back before this stuff was so instantly available and didn't that happen in California around Prop 8? they were doing a map situation of people who were opposed to Prop 8 absolutely and people were reporting that they'd been threatened in their homes and you can plot it right on a Google map oh that's where he lives yes we have a question over here so kind of going back to the first question could I ask you to speak up please sorry I'm old and deaf I guess something that I'm kind of conflicted about is when you have local news on the internet what happens to those who don't have a lot of access to the internet like how are they going to get their local news is it just a question of communities with access to internet probably have higher ad revenue so that's what we're going to focus on and does that leave a lot of people out discuss yes well there's actually two sides to that one is what you'll find is communities with lower rates of internet access also tend to have lower coverage as David pointed out Patch is not covering the infrastructure and even Roslin but Cambridge is like I don't get that I don't get it either but I think internet access is not going to be as access to the internet it's not going to be as big an issue as it may have been a few years ago not only are all the libraries equipped with terminals now you now have even if it's a token effort Comcast for example just announced some program to give low cost computers to people who have who are on school lunch programs as the cost of computing as the cost of internet access comes down that's going to be less of an issue what becomes more of an issue is the information itself if there's nobody in Roxbury reporting on what's going on in Roxbury and there really isn't the banner covers the black community but it's more than just Roxbury who is going to step up and cover that the globe does now they were late to Roxbury Roxbury and Dorchester were not among their first going to be a cover structure yes and the Dorchester reporter covers Matapan and Dorchester I'm not saying there's no coverage but you know the town of Milton it has a patch site it has a your town site it has a gatehouse site it's this little nothing town where sure every couple of years some high school kid goes berserk and kills all his neighbors or something but in general nothing happens there send the emails to Adam it's like you know they've got the surfeit of coverage and a community site yes yes that's right there's a guy your town your Milton exactly or something like that you know so at some point I think you know and this is something that's bothered me for a while because when you hear about Roxbury what do you hear about you hear about the murders you hear about the horrible things and I think there were four people who were murdered in Matapan last year and it was pretty shocking to see the cover of Matapan and all of a sudden all of these guys with cameras and everything are showing up people are really pissed in Matapan to the point where there was a reporter for one radio station which I won't name but it wasn't GBH you know wrote a piece about how somebody put her hand up and said don't take the photograph of this woman coming out of church what did the reporter do told the photographer take a picture of the woman you know so that there's a disconnect between something I'd love to see you know Dale Wood I just happened to stumble across the Roxbury site well we talk about this you know I guess the position we would take is that we're trying to provide news and information to people where they want it and when they want it you know we haven't really talked about mobile you're set up very well to deliver news via your Twitter feed on mobile you know we have a print product the newspaper that circulates throughout greater Boston as well as websites as well as an increased mobile presence as well as you know we have video on our site so we're trying to do it on whatever platform including print that you know that serves the readers and we're looking at the different at the offices crack down on underage drinking is a story from the Huntington News which is the Northeastern University student newspaper just thought I'd put in a plug if I could just add one thing to what David said I think the mobile technology is really going to make a difference you may or may not know that you know there's an incredible number and I wish I had the exact data right now but the community is close to begin with so if you start looking at communities where there may be impacts of Latino folks living then there's an opportunity there to get some information to them that way same thing you know black folk are right behind them so there may be in some of these communities that are underserved by print product or even by online product that somehow that comes together on the web in a way through can I ask a follow-up question to that before you do let me make one observation because I think that the non-profit model fits in with this as well and then I'd love to hear from you I'm sorry and then we have more questions too you know New Haven is a largely African-American Latino poor community and the New Haven Independent has put extraordinary effort into covering public school reform neighborhood stories all the sorts of things that are not particularly interesting to affluent readers in the suburbs and the advertisers who are trying to reach them so I think that the non-profit model is absolutely vital for reaching these underserved communities because for the most part advertisers aren't interested in those you need to reach them through other ways and I'm sorry please ask your follow-up as a follow-on to that while there are great inroads and if you when I look at I live right outside of Worcester when I look at the just Twitter feeds in the area three quarters of them are in Spanish because of the you know the high activity among the Latino local Latino community but you know I get up early in the morning where the print newspaper is delivered in our neighborhood it's to us and to the 70-year-old couple living next door to me and then they leave because there's nobody else getting the print paper as a result we get a 16-page paper on Monday they're just it's a newsletter people who do not have a not just access because you're going to the library to read a newspaper online that you know the the folks just are not going to do so we are leaving a lot of folks behind a lot of folks for whom digital access is not necessarily a function of money it's a function of training of experience of attitude you know we see the sort of stickiness that Facebook and some other entities are trying to cultivate to get people to live inside that world and there's a lot of people and when the marketing used to be for TV and for newspapers you know people north of 45 used to be the sweet spot that's where you wanted to go because they had the free cash they're being left behind by this by this move and you know I don't mind it I live in I love this stuff but I'm seeing my neighbors I'm seeing my peers I'm even seeing you know my kids are in their forties who are saying where do I get the news I can't get the local newspaper because it's all behind a firewall okay maybe one quick response and then we'll move on they're getting it from Facebook as you mentioned I mentioned there have been a couple of murders in the South and recently news about those murders spread way faster on Facebook if you were from Vila Victoria you knew who was dead within an hour whereas the mainstream media people like me didn't have it we may have had that there was people are informing themselves that's why you are seeing news organizations going into multiple platforms it isn't just paper anymore it's not even just a website anymore it is Facebook it is Twitter it's mobile as Kelly said everybody has a cell phone now almost all cell phones now you can get news on and you're just going to see that trend okay we have we've gone over mostly the print and digital side of it but I was just curious as is there in this evolving world as the media continues to evolve into this new world where do you see these new sites hyper local sites in a lot of ways interacting with local commercial television and local commercial radio and I should disclose I do I'm a contributor at GBH I blog for Boston.com I'm also WRK02 there's no conflicts here but I'm just curious where you see these not just trying to see where you see these sites interacting with local commercial television and radio because I remember earlier we were talking about how it's I think it was Kelly said these are just it's just a collection of murders and animal abuse stories or something like that on the local but just how do you see those developing to anybody on the panel I think it provides an opportunity that is largely untapped because we don't realize the potential of any part of cyberspace so in as much as they could look around and recognize that that's where they have to go to drive I think interest to their show their broadcast show is the way to go and I think there are all kinds of forces working in that direction first of all you know as we've discussed this whole time people are expecting it to be there they're expecting that's the information from a local new show they want something other than the first 15 minutes is what President Obama did unless he was in Madapan visiting the school you know they want something about and they're not finding that all the time in those newscasts so they're looking around so it behooves those stations to make some kind of alliances if for no other reason it's just to get content you know at WGBH we have just formed a partnership with a website called Exonomy because we're really interested in innovation my news director is really interested in innovation it's a big thing in Massachusetts and he said we're really not covering it well there's a bit here there's a bit here there's a bit there why don't we take that on as something that we can do here and we cannot reinvent the wheel we're not a we don't have a staff of 50 to do enterprise reporting in that way and here's some people who are sitting right here with them so I mean that's that we're a public media station but I think as commercial stations look around they figure out that they have to do that kind of outreach as well I mean it's expected I think at this point it was an interesting experiment in the Washington area a couple of years ago where a TV station set up this huge network of with local blogs and local news sites and it failed miserably just as they were getting launched the TV station didn't really want to be hyper local so they fired the editor they cut all the funding and the thing collapsed and I don't know if on the commercial side if that's you know people are scared about that but radio and TV stations are media organizations like everybody else and you know they're channel five all the TV stations now solicit photographs and they put up these slide shows not the most ambitious of projects it's pretty easy to do but you know they're slowly getting into it they've been behind like newspapers and coming to grips with the technology let's just say let's put it on the table that was being nice most local TV stations websites are crap I mean they're really bad and what angers me is that you know broadcasters such as myself you had a lock on the big part of it which is the video you know we know how to do video and audio we're not afraid of this while you know print reporters were out here talking about how do you do a story do audio and video at the same time and write hello TV that's how you do it so I mean I just can't believe that television stations allowed themselves to be beat up this way when this was an obvious opportunity a clear ability to show off the central part of the technology that is of great interest to people and they've blown it pretty much I think and by blowing it it's given us an opportunity over the last two or three years that's true that's true over the last two or three years we've ramped up our video operation significantly we've the Boston.com has won some local Emmys we did a terrific package on Senator Kennedy's life and death and it's now regularly featured on Boston.com and you know what we had seen for years is the local TV stations and they still do it was in the globe that morning and we see an opportunity to get out front and provide that coverage in a digital video way I mean the other thing that is happening as you say is because everybody has some access to some of these tools no matter if you're a radio person or a TV station or a cable station or a newspaper you can get into these different spaces so they're at the beginning the radio stations have a web presence a text presence and so do the some of the TV stations and you know they're not great but their audience isn't actually terrible and I would say that WBUR which is our competitor they set up their websites to be an original enterprise you know some supplement of their programming but mostly enterprise that's not how GBH was set up we now slowly over to do some enterprise reporting so that's a little bit of a difference you'll see some of that happening again that's the public media space I would also say I sit on the jury for the Dupont Columbia Awards which it's the Pulitzer for broadcast journalist and we three years ago opened up made a different category for really what we call broadcasting on the web exclusively to the web the first year we got some people were doing it last year a little better this year I think we're in a race we got some really really good stuff that I've seen thus far and I haven't had the big meeting yet to see what other people have seen so the level of sophistication what's available and most importantly the understanding that multimedia does not mean just throwing every tool at the story but really understanding what's best in video what piece of it can be told in video what's best in audio what's best in print so that at any one of these points if I go to it I'm getting the story and it may lead me to want to read this or hear this and if you're not doing that then that's not multimedia that's just you know throwing the media spaghetti at the wall okay I want to say I did not recognize Garrett Quinn of boston.com WRKO and WGBH because the light is in my eyes but thank you for coming and over here the light is not in my eyes so I can see that we're about to hear from Jason Premis of Open Media Boston thanks Dan so yeah so I run an online community news weekly and I've been doing it for three and a half years which we're getting on being a long distance runner at that point put out hundreds of stories about boston and stuff and I go to all these conferences how do the fortunes ogre for these new entrants into the news markets and we're a non-profit right and we're in the mix in networks like the block by block network which Knight of course has been helping along of publications like ourselves which includes non-profits and for profits and I was just over across town at the pre-conference that JLab at American universities was running today called it where all the players that Dan and others have mentioned nationally were there so New Haven Independence there Texas Tribune's there right barista net was there Debbie spoke you know everyone's there no one's making money online news association national conference is the pre-conference but you know all these folks are in town actually and of course we were talking about money what do we always talk about how are we making money and no one's making money like not even New Haven Independent I mean they're just about a quarter million I mean they're doing well by our standards but even the folks that run regional ad networks and stuff aren't making much more than that annually we make under 50,000 a year right now I mean we're just trying to really become like a real boy in Pinocchio terms I pay myself but that's about it and pay stringers sometimes when I can the point is just that all three million dollars dumped on them by their regional foundations so like or had big angel investors like the Texas Tribune where they just got you know here's two million bucks two years ago you go do your thing okay they're doing pretty good right St. Louis Beacon has a budget about five million you know so I mean they're up and running they're becoming majors the rest of us the ecology of foundations the advertising certainly is working to sustain us so I I'm asking the panel therefore what about expanding public media public funding I mean you know Cal you actually work in public media I mean we've seen models in other countries like the National Film Board in support of documentary film making why wouldn't it be possible to have independent public funding you know run by community committees you know with various luminaries to community publications in the public interest you know so that we can be sure that we in the furtherance of democracy that we have grassroots journalism going on or journalism in general terms everywhere it needs to be including communities like Rocksbury Matapan Dorchester where there's not advertising dollars there's not a reason for Patch or others to just rush in you know where the globe and others that's why publications like mine exist actually I mean because there's a news vacuum so we're trying to fill it what why couldn't we talk about expanding public media no question that public media is gets less funding in the United States than in almost any other western democracy so what about it is this something that could happen what I was about to say that this reminds me of my mother telling us always the difference between can and may yeah you have the ability to you can I mean that's the whole that's what it comes down to look at the BBC always in my life as a broadcast journalist was held up as this is it this is the model and people are getting ugly about the BBC they've gotten ugly they're laying off folks in ways they never had to and they have proved positive of what you can get when you invest in it when everybody invests in it to make certain that you are getting stories that everybody wants to hear and stories that we just they had it there was the proof and yet that was not enough to be supported you know everywhere you look in public media people are getting laid off it's very serious and scary for some of us in it and their public media is in a place right now where they're trying to figure out how to reinvent really how to bring back to the numbers that were there at some point and maybe people thought the numbers were there to not get done in a commercial setting or if it cannot is not being done in a commercial setting I think there's more evidence of that than ever now but I don't know that people have a value have placed a value on it and the same kind of conversation I had with my book club members asking who's watching or who's reading local news and I get this mixed bag for a lot of people and these it's in a book club so we're we're talking readers people who just brings them something so you first have to somehow get people of a mindset and I don't know how you demonstrate it that it does bring you something that it is important that we must know and it has to be supported and then after that maybe there's some expansion to public media in the way that we have not seen in this country but Dan makes an excellent point trust me there is a lot of people in the GBA rolling around in dough I'd like to see them I'd like some of that dough we're rolling around in supposedly because it's just not happening you know before before we hear for more panelists on this because I think it's a really important issue I mean we can't ignore the political context in which we exist I mean I mean this room might be full of people who'd like public radio survives year to year from having all of its public funding eliminated we see that as a victory so I mean what about it Adam and Dave any thoughts as to whether this is anywhere close to being on the horizon no it's not going to happen not when you have a Tea Party that's essentially controlling the Congress and then the question is if the Tea Party is essentially controlling Congress do you really want those people giving out money to trust them with public broadcasting funds or not broadcasting in this case public media I think you're really going to have to look it's going to be have to be a grassroots local effort or statewide effort don't look to Washington for anything I agree I mean the political landscape is in there you know what's been kind of remarkable in the last several years is the way foundations have stepped into this void night with a lot of you know seed money to encourage innovation in the hyperlocal space other organizations you know local foundations as Dan mentioned the St. Louis Beacon model is fascinating you know and the trick then I think you know everybody's got a different business model but the trick then is to sort of get some some foundation money and figure out a way to sustain beyond that to build community around your brand so that you sell ads or you know the other big thing is partnerships with other organizations we have a partnerships with several universities in town whether students are writing as part of their academic curriculum and you know we're posting their stories on our sites you know others have much bigger you know partnerships with the like local public radio and some market so okay and we have a very patient questioner over here hi first I'd like to try to answer a question the panel has posed a couple of times and ask one of my own I'm a citizen journalist in Cambridge and to me the answer to why Patch isn't here is that it's something of a wise decision Cambridge has an extremely low level of civic engagement low voting rates low interest in local politics and it's also become somewhat a city of transience and you know people who come here for a few years to you know go to college then go off for people you know Harvard people are focused on Harvard MIT people are focused on MIT you know the Google engineers and the Genzyme engineers care about what they care about in Cambridge that people cared about since run control went away so I mean the Cambridge you think you know you know isn't you know the one that's here and I actually read a couple of stories about that last week and you know that you look at what the median income in Cambridge is and it's gone up like that while you know US has gone down but let me let me move on to my question which is really about social media you know Adam uses it in one way sort of you know Twitter as a call it a surveillance device to figure out what's going on in the world if I could have come up with a better word I would have and also as a megaphone to find out you know what's going on out there Facebook is used for sort of call it Count Crier of you know stuff that's going on but I mean there's another thing that's happening which I'd like folks to comment on you've got the wrong example page up there for me but if you went you know back to you know Adam's side he has a fake Facebook like tweet this story and some other icons I couldn't quite figure out read it something else and you know the globe is doing that too you know I mean using call it third party social graphs as a way of you know broadcasting stories I mean today Facebook made a whole lot of announcements one of which is that they've reinvented the newspaper and those were their words which seems you know there's a Washington Post app on Facebook so that you can see what you know what stories in the Washington Post your friends are reading and things like that my question is I mean as we've talked about you know the local sites we haven't really talked about you know the elephant in the room you know which are these social you know social sites which are you know which we outsourced the broadcast of interest too is that a good thing is it inevitable and I mean where where does that trend lead I mean one other way of putting it is that is the community journalism has typically been the public square and we are turning over a lot of the public square to large private corporations so that's I think that's an extension of one of the things that you're getting at any thoughts exactly whenever I rely on third party for anything I do get a little concern to be honest the ICONS force more as a traffic builder you know so if somebody like one of my stories got picked up I read it not just the local one but the national one and my traffic it was great it went through the roof and since my advertising models all cost per thousand it was wonderful but I have there's a site in the Catskill Mountains called Watershed Post which I've done some work for it's a hyperlocal site one of the things they did was using a platform called Drupal which is a very nice community platform they ripped out the commenting part because nobody was commenting except spammers you can embed Facebook comments now that's what they're doing and the amount of comments they get now on their stories it is incredible because now they're exposed to this huge audience on this huge platform but you do have to worry about are you giving up some level of control of the information data anymore not that they were using it so I answer anything but it's like they've lost that relationship with their users so yes you do have to be careful at a previous job we had a problem where Google took out every single page of our site because they thought we were trying to do something you know fortunately it was a large enough company that we were able to get that fix fairly quickly the media organization was it and you owned everything about your customers or your read listen to me I'm talking like a business person but you know you do have a relationship with the people that you communicate with and what happens if Facebook decides that you violated one of their policies and they don't let you do that you know six months or years worth of comments by hundreds of people they disappear I'm just saying that I'm worried I'm kind of fascinated by all of the not just the latest Facebook thing but I was just reading about the Wall Street Journal partnering with Facebook to funnel their content and I thought that was interesting they apparently did that completely independently of anything Facebook was planning which is you know one of those you know sort of interesting things but yeah I mean it's another case where you know you know selling their soul in a certain way you know to get the Facebook readers because you understand you're talking about a media organization or by Rupert Murdoch yes if they were to have a soul they would have sold it I mean the thing about it is that you know and I'm not a big Facebooker I'll just tell you that right now I have one for the show and but I am really suspicious of it because they keep doing this seconds they're changing something and I don't like that so people are always sending me something like whatever this is not where I want to be but Twitter I have a different relationship with which is interesting so I don't feel that but I think to myself one of the things that bothers me a little bit about new sharing on Facebook is it really very much depends on what your community is or who your community is I mean I had a conversation with about 50 and I said to him okay so what if your group is stupid so all you're getting is stupid news and he said that's a problem well you see you know I would like to have just a broader kind of thing going on and that just bothers me so I've I mean I know that's the way of the future I think you've just given an example of something that really is scary to me where they're the Facebook comments aside from the potential control or loss of them it seems to me are as big as Facebook is can be too narrow so that that bothers me and I'm all about different voices and you know for most of my life and I'm sure it's going to continue most of a lot of the voices that I need to hear from are not going to be in that little circle so already that would be limiting to me I think the thing that a lot of people are trying to figure out is where do the comments go in the newspaper site world most with many newspaper sites are you know legacy news organization sites the comments are can be anonymous or with you know fake names or first names or what not some news organizations have gravitated to where the comments take place on Facebook and I think is a no matter of course on Facebook real name which changes the comments sometimes but it also exposes the product or the story to a huge audience 600 million users which you know whether you like it or not is Adam says in terms of traffic drivers is not something to be ignored so you think it's a good thing we're experimenting with it we we went with where I think the gentleman was going to are we have virtual sites so there is a Boston dot com Cambridge Facebook page but when you click on it you're sent to to our site the but in Summerville we've switched over to where it's actually rests on on the Facebook server and it's six of one at this point in my case we're talking about a fairly small set of people and a fairly narrow readership I think in the hyper-local space we're trying to beam into individual communities at least the way we've set our model up you know it might not matter one way or the other I want to know the comments are different are you getting better we're not getting that many comments on in either case we have we had a fair number of likes the metric that we're using to sort of get people to follow us in the Facebook spaces likes and you know we've driven those up into five or six hundreds per town in some cases the comments then rest on our site and you know we've write something that's sort of provocative a lot of comments I haven't read every one of those comments usually you'll kind of boston.com comments and are you comfortable with Facebook owning your content and also owning probably knowing more about your metrics than you do it's an odd situation we're using them as a distribution device and I'm not making the decisions here at the strategic level but personally it's an odd situation to play in the space because there's so many users and there's just ways to reach people that way like Adam I've become much more fascinated with Twitter you know over the last three or four months because it's so instantaneous but I've begun to wonder whether you know essentially what we're doing the conversation is great and your model is great but in many ways we're clicking to our content so we're using that distribution device in hopes of getting them back to our site but they might not be clicking on our story and so the business model that we have in which we want them to come back to our story is not being fulfilled you know let me offer an example of the first corporation covered a 4th of July parade that turned out to have an extremely crude and offensive float it was this and it was very controversial because they made a video and put it on their website and they were delused with complaints but this was a public parade that was this like many news organizations especially smaller ones gatehouse the gatehouse papers used YouTube as their video publication platform YouTube removed the video YouTube owned by Google simply removed the video as best as anybody at gatehouse could tell YouTube's policy is that if they get one complaint now if they had taken a picture of this offensive float and run it in their print edition I don't know whether Goss International was going to come out to the paper and say you know what we're going to load up our presses and truck them away because we don't we don't like what use you were putting to our presses so yeah I completely agree I think various third-party platforms and and I think that this could come bite us in some very unexpected ways as it did with gatehouse they had to run around and find another platform I think they finally got it up on Vimeo or something I am getting the signal you have been you have been a wonderful audience you have been a fantastic panel can we hear it for our panelists please and I honestly am I supposed to just close this or are you going to have something to say well okay thank you thank you so much for coming have a great night and this will be online at some point if you want to watch it again