The Future of Community Websites (And Why You Should Care) PDF Print E-mail
Written by Tara Leonard   
SANTA CRUZ (December, 2009) - What is the role of community websites in the ever-changing media world? Is the internet killing journalism or creating a new, more inclusive method of information sharing? And what the heck is an “aggregator”? These are just a few of the questions participants pondered last week at a conference called “Entrepreneurship and the Community Web” sponsored by The University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism. Maria Gaura and I, co-founders of Santa Cruz Wire, joined the creators of fifteen other local or hyper-local websites based in California to discuss the financial, legal and editorial challenges of managing a community based, on-line news source. We were both fascinated and frustrated by what we heard. Because this topic has lasting implications for how news and information will be delivered in the future, we want to share our impressions with SC Wire readers.
David Westphal, Senior Fellow at the Annenberg Center on Communication Leadership and Policy, was inspired to host the conference after researching community news sites for the past year. “Community websites are providing a valuable addition to the media landscape,” he said. “It’s hard to generalize since they’re wildly diverse. In some cases, they’re filling gaps caused by the decline of legacy media. In others, they’re providing news in ways that were never covered by old media.”
According to research released in November by American University’s J-Lab: The Institute for Interactive Journalism, community websites are “characterized by a deliberate shift in the definition of objectivity, a drive for community conversation and discussion, and broader definitions of ‘news’ that seek to connect readers to a sense of the place where they live.” 
The majority of sites represented at the conference are accomplishing these goals through one or more of the following elements: original, local content written by professional journalists; unpaid and frequently anonymous content from “unfiltered” contributors; and hyperlinks to previously published news sources including websites, blogs and Twitter feeds.
For instance, many sites invite commentary about local issues and real-time events from readers. The idea is to provide an open exchange of ideas from diverse community members. In some cases, this streaming content is edited by the website host, but more often it is “unfiltered”, meaning it is neither edited nor fact-checked. Instead, sites rely on “crowd control” to police these types of threads, with users identifying and correcting misinformation by other contributors.
Peter Sklar, editor of Edhat in Santa Barbara, sees many benefits to this open policy, including the ability to produce more stories using fewer resources and stories with more diverse points of view. “We’ve been running this model for over three years,” he said. “There has never been a situation where inaccurate information was left standing for an extended period of time.”
This approach has also been successful for Leimert Park Beat, a site based in a primarily African-American neighborhood of L.A. historically underserved by traditional media. Editor Eddie North-Hager allows members to create their own profiles and contribute their own blogs, photos and videos.
Other ways that site editors collaborate with readers is by printing their unedited letters, event listings, and even press releases, an activity which had some old-school journalists in attendance squirming in their seats. The concept of journalistic objectivity is apparently being replaced by a new term, “transparency.”
“Transparency is and will be a very important ethic in the new media,” Westphal said. “It both enables and behooves journalists to be fully upfront with readers.” In other words, it’s okay to print unfiltered content if it is identified as such. For example, Coastsider in Half Moon Bay clearly labels different types of contributions so readers know if they are reading a letter, a press release, or an article.
Many community websites also find previously published news that is relevant to local readers and repackage it in user-friendly ways. This is known as “aggregating”. For instance, Blog Downtown in L.A. has a section entitled “Headlines: Stories about Downtown from Elsewhere on the Internet.” This site also links to relevant blogs and Twitter feeds from diverse sources.
While all of this inclusion is exciting and, some would argue, revolutionary, it raises serious questions about standards of accuracy and objectivity, not to mention the problem of how “content providers” are compensated for their work. If you take a close look, many community websites are little more than a list of hyperlinks to other articles – articles written by people who aren’t being paid for their use. It’s one thing to dash off a 40-word, opinion-based Twitter post. It’s quite another to complete research, track down expert sources, and present a fair, balanced, and carefully written article. (Remember punctuation? Remember spelling?) While there’s no such thing as a free lunch, it seems everyone is trying to make a buck off of free content! Of course, as fewer news sources pay for original content, it will become limited in scope and essentially circular, with numerous sites cross-referencing the same source materials. In the worst case scenario, original content and the professional journalists who provide it will eventually disappear. What will aggregators do once there’s nothing left to aggregate?
Thus the stickiest issue of all, which is how to financially support community websites. A number of options were floated at the conference, including advertising, subscriptions, non-profit grants, and content sponsorships. One site, New West, actually hosts an annual conference for real estate agents and developers! For those of us trained on the concept of a church/state separation between editorial and advertising, it’s hard to believe that this type of sponsorship arrangement doesn’t effect editorial decisions. Founder Jonathan Weber assured conference attendees that it does not. However, how likely is a reporter to investigate corruption at a local developer when that very corporation pays her salary?
Westphal takes a more sanguine approach. “In the world of small, community newspapers the same person has been selling ads and writing stories for decades,” he reasoned. “So this isn’t really a new notion. I think it’s clear we will see more opinion journalism in the future. However, point-of-view journalism is a rich part of our history and is quite common in most parts of the world. Hopefully, consumers will still have access to news that’s accurate, fair and rich with content. If that happens, the sum total will be a richer ecosystem of news and information than we’ve ever had.”
That’s a pretty big if.
Therefore, it was a relief to also hear about sites such as L.A. Spot which is experimenting with a model in which readers use the power of collective giving to support investigative news stories. Meanwhile California Watch the nation’s oldest nonprofit investigative news organization, is exploring new models of collaboration to ensure “the role that journalism plays in a functioning democracy—informing the public and holding the powerful accountable.”
In the end, while many at the conference appeared not only willing but eager to abandon what they consider outdated vestiges of traditional journalism, we here at Santa Cruz Wire prefer to take a stand in the name of fair and accurate reporting. But we’re not burying our heads completely in the ever-shifting sands! We DO want to hear from you, our readers. We DO want to encourage an open dialogue about the issues that matter most to Santa Cruz residents. And we DO want to provide point-of-view pieces such as this one as long as they are reasonably presented and – dare I say it? – transparent.
So we will be thinking long and hard in the next few weeks about how to incorporate interactive features into the site without turning it into yet another cacophonous chat room. (We will most likely ask that if you have an opinion to share, that you do so without the all-too-comfortable shield of anonymity.) We’ll be looking at different funding models, including a possible shift to a 501C3 organization. And we’ll be considering some collaborative content sources, such as working with local college and university writing programs. If you have other suggestions, we’d love to hear them. (Just click on the “Contact Info” link at left.) Most of all, we hope that you’ll stick around for what is sure to be a fascinating ride into the future of online journalism.


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