Hoping to learn more details about Peer News from editor John Temple’s presentation at Thursday’s NewsMorphosis conference, I sat down on Friday and tried to watch the version posted on Ustream.
Technology didn’t cooperate. Ustream offered up an image that jerked, stalled, and then crawled along before stalling again and again. Then, when it totally froze, I started again and found it wouldn’t let me jump forward in the video. To see the end, I would have to wade through the whole experience again. Sorry, John. I gave up, and I really don’t know how much I missed.
Luckily, John posted his notes on his own blog, although he says he strayed from them.
What did we learn?
• This will not be citizen journalism.
• It will be a membership organization, although some level of access will be open to all. So I’m trying to figure how many members, and at what level of membership fees, will be needed to drive this buggy. Right now, they’ve got an editor, assistant editor, three reporters, and three “reporter hosts”, plus at least one techie. I don’t know what they’re paying, but take a round number of $40,000 each, and with benefits that must add up to a payroll of well over $400,000, plus other operating costs. Will there be a sales staff? More in-house tech? Financial types? How much will users be willing to pay? How many memberships will it take to be both profitable and sustainable?
• No provision is being made for comments, although the site will encourage “debate, discussions, conversations”. Anonymity not allowed, although it wasn’t clear whether participants will have to make their identities public in order to take part, or simply register with their real identifies but adopt pseudonyms. Anyone who has worked with sources who need to remain anonymous for one reason or another can appreciate how much information they can bring to an issue.
• Peer News will be “taking stands”, while at the same time somehow standing aside and informing members while encouraging them to form their own opinions. That sounds like an immediate source of tension/conflict, and it’s not clear who will define the positions to be taken by Peer News.
• The words “holistic” and “big picture” were repeated. News will be reported but “episodic reporting” will be avoided through always providing access to the “big picture”.
• Reporting will be focused on a limited number of “issues we know people care about”. Less is more, I guess.
• The implication is that local issues will be the focus (Honolulu’s rail mentioned as possible topic), but how can local issues attract the membership needed to produce enough income to sustain the operation? Does that signal an attempt to deal with key national issues as well?
• Temple cited this blog entry by Matt Thompson as an example of the journalistic issues they’re struggling with in designing the Peer News approach.
All in all, suggestive and interesting, but still elusive.
Patience, I suppose, is in order.
Discover more from i L i n d
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
Ian, I hope you do get the UStream video to work for you. I’m interested as to what Peer News will look like and how it will function, so I paid attention (initially) to the twitter stream for #hinews during NewsMorphosis 03/18/10. It didn’t really tell me anything except some of the others who were there or also looking for info.
John Temple’s notes were better, but the video provided the best explanation IMO.
I’m cautiously optimistic that Peer News can be this shiny new thing that many people know is missing in news/media but can’t figure out how to solve.
I’m already feeling a little let down and ambivalent about Peer with the “news” that our (Kaua`i) top flight reporter- an anomaly for our local newspaper- Mike Levine is being raided by Peer and instead of keeping him here to cover Kaua`i he’s moving him to O`ahu.
The Honolulu-centric bent of the Hawai`i MSM is what has ensured the caricaturish, buffoonishly corrupt neighbor island politician will thrive and I thought maybe Peer might be different- Their promise of state-wide coverage is belied by their first action in hiring Levine away.
While I look forward to hard- or at least harder- state and city and county news apparently not only will they not be covering neighbor islands but are taking out best people to cover Honolulu where there are multiple news sources all-be-they corporate already.
I hope I’m wrong but the facts so far seem to be, at beast eyebrow raising
Meanwhile, MSN.com started showing local Hawaii news in the bottom half of their site. FOR FREE!
I’m hopeful Peer News will work out, but I’m not holding my breath.
There’s obviously a real need for in-depth, responsible reporting on local issues in any community. But how big is the market for it here, especially the paying market? The news in this market has been dumbed-down for so long with quick daily hits on crime and brush fires, and the market sure doesn’t seem to demand much more from the existing media.
I was pleased to hear Temple mention a desire to report on the rail project, and I encourage him to do so. The Advertiser has been good at pandering to the ideologue rail-haters who feed it information, and at stirring up controversy with terribly slanted, shoddy and misleading or flat-out inaccurate reporting, but has done a huge disservice to this entire community overall, despite editor Mark Platte’s gloating about it at the conference. I honestly don’t think he knows the difference between solid reporting and the absolute travesty he’s overseen.
Homelessness is another issue that begs for some real journalism. The Advertiser did some good work a few years back about the Waianae Coast, but it seemed aimed more at winning awards and impressing mainland audiences than anything else. All we get from them now is the recent round of angry, uninformed, chest-thumping editorials that are riddled with errors of fact and say absolutely nothing meaningful about what’s really going on. The Star-Bulletin did a very respectable series recently, but how many people read it besides the Advertiser’s editorial writers?
Will Peer News cover politics in any depth? The Advertiser’s capitol bureau has done some admirable work, but it’s down to one guy. The reporting by others on the last mayoral race, at both papers and on TV, was probably the weakest I’ve ever seen anywhere. An absolute joke of paint-by-numbers biography, fluff and occasional crybaby claims that didn’t address a single issue with any relevance. There wasn’t much of a race to begin with, but there were lots of opportunities to open things up. You’d think at least one news outlet in town would have mentioned Panos’ role as head of the Hawaii Highway Users Alliance (taxis, tour buses, auto dealers) while he ran for mayor on a kill-rail platform and milked it for all it was worth, then concocted the wacky “EazyWay” scheme with Kobayashi after he tanked in the primary. And nobody got anywhere near the truth of what was really behind that whole episode.
This community is hurting in so many ways now because of the bad economy and other woes, and it’s not getting solid, useful, dependable journalism from any single outlet on a consistent basis. Does Honolulu have the time, money and inclination to support an honest effort?
Let’s hope so.
Amen.
I watched a large portion of the event live, including Temple’s prsentation. A lot still remains to be defined. I guess we will see what they want to do soon enough. Some of the fluffy language caused me concern. I get worried when people at the top want to “build community.” It sounds too much like social engineering.
I tend to trust reporters like Shapiro when they speak in Jeffersonian-Madisonian language than I do publishers and managing editors. A gardener can arrange plants to look beautiful, but who is going to decide which plants are worth keeping and which are weeds, needing to be yanked out before they spread?
Black, the owner of S-B and Midweek, though personally conservative, encourages a much more diverse range of political commentary than the more corporate Gannett. I HATE to believe we have to rely upon the idiosyncratic personalities of sole proprietor media giants to save democratic debate. I guess if we are lucky, Omidyar’s will bestow a benign “democratic space” upon the people of Hawaii.
Wouldn’t it be great if We the people could do this ourselves, without having to rely upon some benevolent prince?
I was at the event and the first question that popped into my mind was “will there be ads to support revenue?”
Someone asked that question right off the bat when questions were being taken and Temple said he was not interested in that kind of revenue.