What will become of News Coop?

I must confess to being one of those people who was making a point of buying a copy of the New York Times on Fridays and Sundays – even if most of the rest of the week the paper was not a “must have” purchase for me.

For those are the two days that the Chicago News Cooperative was publishing two pages worth of content in the editions of the Times that were printed in Chicago.

WHILE I REALIZE that the News Coop has its reporters and free-lance writers out and about every day to come up with copy that fills their web site, there was something about being able to see the printed word that made those two days a little different.

So learning Friday night that the fate of the News Coop is uncertain, it made me wonder what hope there is to assuage those individuals whose judgment of the news business is based purely on a financial “bottom line.”

According to the various reports (although it seems the Chicago Reader gets credit for having this story first), the News Coop will cease to exist in its current form at the end of this week.

Which probably means that the New York Times editions printed this coming Friday and Sunday will be the last to have two full pages of local news content.

THERE IS SOME speculation (reported on by Crain’s Chicago Business) that the Chicago Sun-Times will take on the News Coop, although nothing is definite on that front.

Which makes it likely that this effort to create an Internet-based site that generates quality reporting (some of their stuff, including James Warren’s commentaries, was quite interesting) will continue to exist in a scaled-back form – if at all.

From what I have read, it seems that the New York Times was not willing to consider paying more money for the project, since it did not significantly bolster the circulation levels they achieve in the Chicago area.

Soon to move from the New York Times to the Sun-Times? Or nowhere at all!

Although I can’t help but think that such an attitude misses the point. Maybe they weren’t selling more newspapers because of those four pages per week (actually, three, since a half-page on each day was devoted to local advertising).

BUT I’M GOING to wonder how much lower their Chicago circulation would have been had they not been involved with this News Coop project.

Which is to say that I think many business entities that are trying to make money off of the reporting of news had better come around to realize that there are certain levels of content that are going to have to be maintained if they are to remain viable.

Acting as though there can be continual cuts in quality without hurting the financial bottom line is short-sighted. If anything, people are going to reward those entities that bolster their coverage with their readership (whether it be of the actual printed newspaper or of the Internet sites that use their content).

Of course, it also amuses me to think that the Sun-Times may seriously be considering an effort to use News Coop content in their newspaper. Because I believe their motivation would be to have the News Coop reporters and freelance writers do the actual work of news coverage.

WOULD THAT MEAN further cutbacks of the actual Sun-Times staff – which has become so blended with the remaining staffs of the daily newspapers the company owns throughout the suburbs that I have a hard time telling these days who writes for what newspaper!

Could we get the day that the Chicago Sun-Times would be a few dozen pages filled with stories from a scaled-back Chicago News Cooperative, along with the reports put together by the Better Government Association and the assorted wire services?

That makes it seem like we have a big-city paper trying to behave like one of the daily papers published in many rural communities – where on any given day there might be one locally-produced story published alongside the wire copy that fills the space surrounding the display ads.

Which is why I think it a joke whenever these small-town publishers claim they are somehow more responsive to the needs of their communities. In reality, they are simply putting together cheap products – and feeding off the fact that they have no competition that would reveal just how cheap they are to read.

SO I’M GOING to be watching over the course of the next few weeks to see how this particular situation shakes down, and it is something many of you should pay attention to as well – although I suspect most of you won’t give this a second thought until it is too late.

For the fact is that while many people think the Internet with various websites has already replaced the companies that were publishing the news on paper to be read without having to use a computer screen or any other kind of electronic device, they haven’t.

Too much of the content I read there is merely repeated from the places with actual reporters. The very business models of these entities is based on the idea of not having to pay for content creation (a.k.a., reporting the news).

What happens when the day comes that there’s nobody left with reporters for these sites to pick stories up from?

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Foundations the new news trend -- for now

On the surface, Chicago-area news junkies ought to be celebrating these days.

At a time when some people are getting all worked up over the expected demise of newspapers and wondering where the information will come from (since most other mediums for distributing information rely heavily on newspapers to do the actual work of reporting information), there are two new organizations getting involved in the local news business.

ONE IS THE Chicago News Cooperative, which has gained a visible position for itself by producing two pages worth of stories twice a week for the New York Times. It gives the "Grey Lady" a way of claiming it is offering more local news in the editions of the Times that are sold in the Chicago area -- without having to produce it themselves.

Just a couple of weeks later, we got our introduction to Illinois Statehouse News, which is offering up coverage of activity at the Statehouse in Springpatch, along with state government activity in Chicago.

Both of these outfits have websites that they plan to use eventually to disseminate the stories they are reporting. For the time being, they're using the old medium of the printed page -- the news coop turning up in the Times and the statehouse news offering its stories to any newspaper that wants to publish them.

Their website literally tells publishers to "steal our stuff," so long as credit is given to the Illinois Statehouse News. Thus far, I have seen their stories published in Chicago's Southwest News-Herald and in the Times of Northwest Indiana (a Munster, Ind.-based publication whose circulation area spills over into Illinois -- including Chicago's 10th Ward).

BOTH OF THESE outfits are receiving financial support from foundations to help them cover the cost of paying a few reporter-types to actually dig up stories that don't rely on rewriting what is already in the newspapers (which is what most weblogs that claim to be news oriented actually amount to).

The Franklin Center for Government and Public Integrity is funding the statehouse news project, and some critics already are accusing the outfit of being created to put some sort of conservative spin on the information coming out of the Statehouse - although the group itself claims to be non-partisan and the people whom they have hired to work for them thus far have been experienced Statehouse reporters who aren't going to be inclined to go along with writing political propaganda passing for news.

The news cooperative is working, for now, as a partnership with WTTW-TV, Chicago's PBS affiliate, and is one of the many worthwhile causes receiving funds from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.

They even have received some pro bono legal assistance from the prominent law firm of Winston & Strawn (which also provided downtown Chicago office space for the news coop in its early days of existence). These aren't exactly outfits being run off of a laptop computer set up on someone's kitchen table).

THE TWO OUTFITS thus far have done competent work. The statehouse news project has produced daily stories that adequately fill the space in newspapers around the ads, while the news coop drew some attention to itself by getting an interview with Cook County Board President Todd Stroger that helps illustrate how weak a grasp the man has these days on political reality.

Now as someone who has worked in the newsgathering business for the past couple of decades and who hopes to remain as a reporter-type in some fashion for the remainder of my working life, I find it encouraging that someone is willing to get involved in the funding of a news organization or two.

The reality is that the whole appeal of advertising on the Internet is that the ads are dirt cheap. It is highly unlikely that a website devoted to offering up serious news reporting would ever be able to survive on the income from ads (particularly if they are of the pop-up variety that most readers go out of their way to ignore).

I just wish the funding sources were a little bit more long-term than these charitable or ideological foundations.

FOR THE REALITY is that these are the kind of groups that are likely to offer up money for a year or two before deciding to move on to other projects.

Which means that the people who gave up jobs elsewhere (in particularm, the news coop is staffed with many people who gave up Chicago Tribune gigs to work there) had better hope that someone is developing a plan for financing in future years, or else they run the risk of seeing their "revolutionary" news organizations go down the toilet -- and unemployment in their future a couple of years from now.

Then again, sticking with their respective newspapers might also have been a risk if the printed publications continue to lose advertising revenue due to the struggling economy and the papers' websites remain incapable of replacing the revenue with its own advertising.

Either way, it's a crap shoot -- although I found it interesting in recent days that the Chicago Sun-Times stole a sports columnist from the Chicago Tribune, only to have the Trib sports section snatch away a beat writer who was covering the Chicago Bears.,

SOME PEOPLE HAVEN'T given up on the print product, which in some ways is a superior medium for the presentation of news. Seriously, reading a long story on a single printed page is much easier than scrolling through copy on a computer screen and having to jump from file to file to get to the end.

I don't know wht the future will hold, particularly after learning that the long-time trade journal of the newspaper industry (Editor & Publisher) is going out of business. I only find it encouraging that some people are trying to figure out the solution, rather than just assuming that something will naturally replace the printed word.

Otherwise, there will be a lot of empty websites in the future for those people who are determined to read their news off a screen rather than paper. That would mean a lot of seriously uninformed people.

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