Patterico's Pontifications

11/7/2006

Gannett to Try Citizen Journalism

Filed under: General — Patterico @ 7:37 am



This sounds promising:

Gannett Co., the nation’s largest newspaper chain, plans to create stories with information from bloggers, people who post in Internet discussion groups and other non-journalists in hopes of winning readers from the Internet, television and other news sources, officials with the company said.

You can generally trust newspapers to screw up a good idea — but at least in theory, this sounds like a good idea.

12 Responses to “Gannett to Try Citizen Journalism”

  1. Why would we pay to read what we can already read for free on the internet?

    AndrewGurn (c37ea2)

  2. Well, there are still some people who don’t read blogs. For those who only get their news from TV and/or newspapers, this could be a plus.

    larry (336e87)

  3. Is this bait-and-switch? Gannett’s military ‘newspapers’ appear to be sympathetic to uniformed people – and then they splash them with attacks against Donald Rumsfeld. It isn’t unlikely that Gannett hopes to mine the antennae of bloggers for further material useful for ‘shaping the dialogue’ and ‘setting the agenda’ and generally herding public opinion in the editors’ preferred directions.

    Insufficiently Sensitive (01397c)

  4. Please. It’s obvious that by “blogs” they mean the Huffington Post and Daily Kos, by “Internet discussion groups” they mean Democratic Underground, and by “other non-journalists” they mean unfiltered liberal propaganda. Think they’re going to tap into Hotair, Newsbusters, LGF or here? Think again.

    xardoz (c1670e)

  5. Would work for me as long as they carefully draw their people from BOTH sides of the aisle (and from only among SANE people – leaving out the BDS, HuffPo and Kos Kids people), which is seriously unlikely!

    Gayle Miller (855514)

  6. Since we don’t trust Gannett news stories, columnists, polls or editorials, why would we trust their selection of bloggers? Their “culture” sections are the culture of Hollywood and the Ivy League, or maybe the UN, but never our culture, and much of the time, not even the culture of Western civilization. We expect their academics and scientists to be red, we expect their lawyers to say the Constitution is obsolete. Why on earth read Gannett?

    exguru (a90377)

  7. Do Not Disturb:

    I don’t have time for Gannett, anytime, anywhere, and couldn’t care less what they do. I’ll never spend another dime on one of their publications, they publish my hometown rag, and I know several of their writers and editors. However, their despicable editorial in military papers was the last words I’ll ever read from them.

    mokus (56972e)

  8. Mokua,

    Hear, Hear. I’ll take the Gannett pledge.

    DRJ (1be297)

  9. Oops. Mokus, that is, or should I say Black Jack?

    DRJ (1be297)

  10. I have no doubt that Gannett will choose blogs from “both sides”. I also have no doubt that they will either fail to realize or fail to acknowledge that there more than two sides, and they’ll also only choose mainstream bloggers. I’m also going to guess that the pay, if any, will be very low and the linkages will be stingy, perhaps even including nofollow tags.

    Read my voting guide (05c6a0)

  11. Hmmm … may be a place there for Dean Baquet, who’s just been let go by the Tribune Co.

    Kevin Murphy (805c5b)

  12. L.A. Times editor to leave the paper
    By James Rainey, Times Staff Writer
    3:01 PM PST, November 7, 2006
    (linked at Drudge)

    Dean Baquet was forced to resign as editor of the Los Angeles Times at the request of the publisher after he refused to agree to further cuts of his editorial staff.

    Baquet’s departure was to be announced on Thursday but word leaked out this afternoon and the 50-year-old editor confirmed to his staff that he would be leaving the paper on Friday.

    Baquet will be replaced by James O’Shea, who is currently managing editor of the Chicago Tribune and a long-time employee of the Tribune company, which owns The Times and 10 other daily newspapers.

    mokus (56972e)


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