Mojo magic or Mojo malaise?

The response to yesterday’s WaPo story about the Gannett mojo (mobile journalists) initiative at Fort Myers has generated a wide range of response - some positive, some negative. I’ll sample a few of the responses below. Later, I hope to write something more substantial in response to a concern raised by Len Witt: Newsrooms must decide: smarten up or dumb down. Read his post when you get the chance, as it’s worth your time. First, some of the highlights and lowlights.

Lucas Grindley: Allow me to revise a point I made a few days ago. The point was basically, “Get a local beat, or lose your job.” I’d like to add, “Or worse, lose your desk.”

Mindy McAdams: I think the News-Press is brave to try this mojo strategy. I just hope that they keep close tabs on the outcomes and adjust the practices as needed to serve their community well. If it seems not to be working well, I hope they make incremental changes to the processes in place — and don’t just say, “Oh, well, that didn’t work either!” — and cancel it.  No matter what you might think about the mojo idea, you ought to consider that cutting it off before they take the time and care to tweak it would be the stupidest move of all.

Gangrey: Could this be the future of journalism? No editorial comment in the post, but read the snarky comments to get a flavor of how this is going down in some circles.

Mark Potts: It’s difficult to get staid newsrooms to accept this kind of significant change, but Gannett’s ambitious program is a big step in the right direction. After USA Today’s debut, it took years for other newspapers to adopt its common-sense innovations (color weather maps, anyone?). How long will it take other newspapers to get the hint about the leading-edge stuff Gannett is trying now?

Frank Barnako: Frank Ahrens is a veteran reporter.  He covers media and technology for the paper. He wrote yesterday’s Washington Post story about how Gannett is changing the rules for print reporters.  Look at the credit line on the photo which accompanied the piece. Ahrens wrote the story and took the picture.

Paul Gillin: The Washington Post recently reported on a Gannett experiment to reinvent news journalism in Fort Myers, Fla. More will follow. Many more. Journalism will become much more local. As the cost of publishing falls to near zero and citizens become more comfortable with the tools of publishing, thousands of mini “newspapers” will form around different geographies and topics. Aggregation sites will emerge to sift through and organize the reports and conversations going on in these small communities. Many of these sites will involve human editors who understand the needs of their audience and monitor online activity on their behalf.

Bill Hobbs: Ironically, the WaPo’s story about the latest news in the news business is a month old. Wired had this story on Nov. 3. I blogged it on Monday, Nov. 6. (And we had it on Nov. 4 - ed.)

Colin Delaney of ePolitics: This strategy runs counter to the trend of recent cutbacks in newsroom staffs, since it does require that media outlets put reporters on the ground, but it may spread if it turns out to be effective in driving traffic to media websites and generating enough advertising revenue to offset declines in print circulation. If so, it opens up new opportunities for electoral and issue campaigns to get publicity for events, since “mojos” (a word I can’t even write with a straight face) will be hungry for stories (see also yesterday’s story on local bloggers).

Dave LaFontaine: As I’ve said earlier, the media is looking more and more like the future that K.W. Jeter envisioned, when each one of us is some kind of permanently on-duty freelancer.  But the cynic in me looks at this deconstruction of the newsroom and wonders if somewhere the corporate bean-counters aren’t chuckling dryly and re-working their spreadsheets to figure out the cost of office space…

Matthew Ingram: This strikes me as exactly the right thing to do, especially for a local newspaper (veteran online journalism consultant and teacher Mindy McAdams thinks likewise but Greg Sterling is more skeptical). Are the “mojos” really doing anything that good local reporters haven’t been doing for decades? No. Except they are using tablet PCs and cellphones and Wi-Fi to do it. The secret is to get close to your audience and talk about the things that matter to them, and they will get close to you.

And again, Len Witt:  I want to be on the record right here: Blogs, vlogs, citizen journalism, crowd sourcing, collective intelligence, should all be aimed at improving journalism, improving our understanding of public life and getting the citizenry more involved in that public life. If journalism comes out for the worse in all of this, we have failed.

And now, your thoughts?

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