I’ve been thinking and rethinking about the Fort Myers mojo madness from last week (see here for previous coverage), and specifically, Leonard Witt’s exceptional call-to-arms: Newsrooms must decide: Smarten up or dumb down. Later, Mark Hamilton discussed mojos and 24-hour news desks in one sitting. And today, Mindy McAdams added her thoughts in response to Witt’s original post, and Angela Grant added further.
I confess that I’m not as upset as any of them by the mojo portrayed in the original WaPo story, if only because I’m loathe to jump to conclusions based on such a small sample. I suppose - with no further data - that the mojo movement is “experimental,” and thus it will evolve somewhat as reporters adjust their methods. I would love to look at a sample of the 14 mojos’ work over a period of several months to see the quantity and quality of their coverage.
But I do want to get a discussion going - if anyone would like to join in - about what we expect from a new model of hyperlocal journalism - especially one that uses reporters from the newsroom. As my research methods professor at South Carolina might say - “operationalize ’smart.’” So what does that mean? Well, Len gives us a couple of hints. Mindy some others. Angela even more. But as I remarked in a comment at Grant’s blog:
Before we start talking about “smartening up” the newspaper, we need to figure out what “smartening up” means - does it mean better editing, or doing more with less? And what do we mean by “more”? What are the things newspaper’s “should” cover? and who says? And - most important of all - who’s going to read/watch/listen to it?
I’d add a few further questions:
- Are frequent updates to a news site important? If so, what types of stories should get such updates?
- What measurements should be used to determine whether a news organization is successful in its “mojo” experiments? Higher web traffic? Circulation? Comments? Web ad sales? Something else?
I honestly don’t know the answers to these questions - and I know there are others, but I can’t think of them right at this moment. But someone needs to be figuring them out. I hope some of these folks will respond either here or in their own weblogs. And others can feel free to chime in as well. I think the college media - and the professional media - would benefit from any insights.
on Dec 13th, 2006 at 11:18 am
[…] The Future of Newspapers: Len Witt says newspapers need to “dumb down or smarten up,” breaking open the pieces of Gannett’s mojo experiment in Fort Myers and analyzing hyperlocal content to check if it’s useful information or just coverage for the sake of covering something local: “Why not send him into a Ft. Myers neighborhood for a week or a month and make him feel like a member of that neighborhood and meet the people, hear their triumphs and tragedies? I think of my own neighborhood. There is the guy who spends his days cutting other people’s lawns, but with the caveat that he will try to save your soul. The guy who painted his house pink, in a place where no one paints their house pink. And he had a reason. The gerrymandering that separates our white neighborhood from the surrounding black neighborhoods. These are real stories that would smarten up the paper and its website rather than dumb them down by asking some random driver what he thinks of the road repair work on a Ft. Myers highway.”(Len via Bryan and Mindy) […]