It’s easy to spend a lot of time focusing on what’s wrong with the way newspapers and other media outlets are dealing with the Web, because let’s face it, there’s plenty of material (a great recent post along those lines is this one from Lectroid.net). But I think it’s worth noting some of the positive things that are going on, and some of the interesting experiments in doing things differently. One that I came across recently is Georgia-based journalism professor Leonard Witt’s “representative journalism” or RepJ project. I found out about it because Witt just recently received a grant of $1.5-million from the Harnisch Foundation to set up a Center for Sustainable Journalism at Kennesaw State University. In his description of Representative Journalism, Witt says:
As mass journalism markets unbundle and become niche markets, news operations, if they are to survive, will have to join the niche movement rather than fight it. Rather than think in terms of a circulation of, let’s say, 100,000, they should think in terms of 100 niche markets of 1,000 each and form membership communities around those niches.
The centerpiece for each membership community will be the news and information tailored to each community’s needs, with a reporter and editing support devoted specifically to each community of 1,000. Online social networking, interactivity, face-to-face events will all be used to build group cohesion.
(read the rest of this post at the Nieman Journalism Lab)