The Solomon Scandals A Washington newspaper novel by David Rothman

Hyperlocal journalism and TBD: More coming on what makes a great ‘hyper’ site

Nope, TBD and affil­i­ate blog­gers, I’m not done yet.

I have a few other ideas to try out this week—based on the fail­ures and suc­cesses of  hyper­local media out­side the D.C. region. Why is a local blog net­work thriv­ing, while the New York Times’ net­work couldn’t score big in the same geo­graph­i­cal area?

And in a sep­a­rate post, I’ll elab­o­rate on a few insights which the pub­lisher of the Upper West­side Inde­pen­dent kindly shared with me. That’s the well-done, civic-minded site writ­ten up here earlier.

Psst! If peo­ple at the Wash­ing­ton Post Com­pany are read­ing this, may these ideas also be help­ful to L Street—including my thoughts on why the Times couldn’t cut it.

Mean­while happy Fourth of July to to every­one. The holiday-weekend pho­tos are from one of the sites I’ll be ana­lyz­ing. I’ll snail a free trade paper­back of The Solomon Scan­dals to the first per­son to fig­ure out the source of the pho­tos with­out prompt­ing. Any­one able to? Write me at davidrothman@pobox.com, with the sub­ject line of “Hyper­local photos. “

Scan­dals isn’t about hyper­local jour­nal­ism per se, but with vig­or­ous grass­roots blogs around, life would have been much hap­pier for cer­tain of the news­peo­ple in the novel, as I’ll explain in yet another post. I’ll also tell why the kind of inves­tiga­tive jour­nal­ism in Scan­dals is in some ways rather obso­lete (or needs to be—making the book all the more rel­e­vant today). Whether in jour­nal­ism, love, bathtub-gin-making or any other part of life,  you can’t repeat the past. That goes for com­pa­nies, too, not just individuals.

Related: I’m pleased that my old paper, the Lorain Morn­ing Jour­nal, briefly men­tioned in fic­tion­al­ized form in Scan­dals, is get­ting more seri­ous about the blo­gos­phere. Here’s a pre­view of “Pot­holes & Seag­ulls: Sto­ries and opin­ions from Lorain Ohio,” cre­ated by OSU jour­nal­ism grad­u­ate Sam Flo­res (with the Journal’s encour­age­ment). The Flo­res blog will be among the Jour­nal Reg­is­ter Com­pany’s blog affil­i­ates. Ear­lier I shared some very detailed thoughts on how the Jour­nal could pro­vide hyper­local cov­er­age in the era of Google. Also see the Jour­nal Reg­is­ter Company’s page on the Ben Franklin Project intended to “rein­vent jour­nal­ism” and TBD Com­mu­nity Engage­ment Direc­tor Steve Buttrey’s sup­port­ive post on this and related ini­tia­tives.

A Franklin video is intended to pop­u­lar­ize the new approach—including “inde­pen­dence” from over­priced software—among the chain’s employ­ees. Appro­pri­ate for July 4th. The Sarato­gian, a Jour­nal Reg­is­ter paper in New York state, cre­ated it.

Update, July 5: Check out links, too, at Medi­agazer, which has just linked to this post. Thanks, Gazer. Yes, it is sig­nif­i­cant to see a news­pa­per chain “open” in the open source sense as well to closer ties with the blog­ging community—and more of a reader-driven approach. Also see Jeff Jarvis’s Buzz Machine blog and related posts.

Update July 6: Here’s a YouTube with more details of the exper­i­ment with the free soft­ware. Also see blog entries by Sarato­gan Web Edi­tor Steve Shoe­maker (list­ing the soft­ware sub­sti­tu­tions) and Man­ag­ing Edi­tor Bar­bara Lom­bardo. The soft­ware sub­sti­tu­tion was exper­i­men­tal, but ide­ally it will encour­age more of the same on a per­ma­nent basis.

You might also like:

• Coming: How the Washington Post and New York Times could cope with TBD and other hyperlocal networks
• Solomon Scandals hyperlocal series so far: A list for latecomers
• Georgetown Dish joins TBD blog network: Deju vu angles—in Washington Post’s backyard
• A regular visitor? What would you like to read about?
• Gore sex probe dropped in Oregon: A NONscandal, without sufficient follow-up in the Washington Post and Politico