Should all newspapers use “mojos?”
The Washington Post has a great piece about the Gannett newspaper chain — the same one that Wired magazine wrote about recently in a feature on what it called “crowdsourcing” — experimenting with “mojos” or mobile journalists, who rarely come into the office and file reports about various local events from their cars, or the local Starbucks, or wherever they happen to be.
The story describes Chuck Myron, a reporter for the Fort Myers News-Press, who “sits in his little gray Nissan and types on an IBM ThinkPad laptop plugged into the car’s cigarette lighter.” Although they are reporters and have all sorts of high-tech tools, they have “no desk, no chair, no nameplate, no land line, no office.” As the story describes it, they spend their time on the road looking for stories to file to the newspaper’s Web site and the print edition, with one principle:
A constantly updated stream of intensely local, fresh Web content — regardless of its traditional news value — is key to building online and newspaper readership.
Papers are slashing national and foreign coverage and beefing up “hyper-local,” street-by-street news. They are creating reader-searchable databases on traffic flows and school class sizes.
The Fort Myers paper has 14 full and part-time “mojos,” and the editor says that she expects by the end of next year all 30 reporters will to some extent match the same profile. The paper also encourages input from citizens in the community on a host of different subjects, and is building databases of local events. There is a managing editor in charge of “audience building” who tracks website traffic. There are user forums on all sorts of different topics.
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. Blogger Dan Blank has some thoughts, and so does “recovering journalist” Mark Potts.
