A User-First Framework for Sustaining Local News - Harvard ...

neighborhood blogs” in Seattle to help the paper fill some of the gaps that cutbacks have
left in neighborhood coverage and to enable the paper to focus on its core specialty—
investigative reporting. So far, The Times has established partnerships with five bloggers,
four of them geographic and one focused on the topic of health care. She pointed out
that four of the five are produced by professional journalists. 115
J‐Lab also provided money to The Charlotte Observer, The Asheville Citizen Times,
TucsonCitizen.com and The Miami Herald for initiatives in those cities. 116
In Miami, Herald executive editor Anders Gyllenhaal said the project would enable a
partnership for hyper‐local news and advertising that aligns the paper with community
weeklies, local bloggers and ethnic publications. “The idea is to mix the long‐standing
traditions of community journalism—neighborhood news, schools reporting, municipal
coverage, profiles, columns and letters—with growing digital tools,” Gyllenhall wrote in
an August 2009 column. “Most importantly, this string of online sites hopes to make full
use of the exchange with readers that modern journalism is becoming.” 117 The Herald
launched its new “Community News Network” in late 2009, incorporating photos,
videos and blog posts by users from more than 40 Miami‐area neighborhoods. 118
In most communities, the term ‘media ecosystem’ suggests a level of natural
harmony among bloggers and established news organizations that has yet to be
achieved. The Project for Excellence in Journalism analyzed a week of news in July 2009
in Baltimore and found that the diminished ranks of old media—mostly The Baltimore
Sun—are still digging up most of the news in town. As the news ecosystem develops, it
will fall to users of news to improve the journalism on several fronts—adding to
fragmentary reports, correcting errors, highlighting and distributing reliable reports by
journalists and others. 119
Using social media tools and their own local contacts, they’ll play an important role
in advancing the story, taking part in what might be called Next‐Step Journalism 120 or,
as Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger puts it, the “mutualization” of news. “Our readers
have become part of what we do,” Rusbridger says. “They form communities around
individual reporters and issues, lending a hand with research and ideas, bringing us up
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