The great debate over the future of news is missing some voices.
I’m talking about readers, viewers, users, community members — the people journalism serves.
Their absence from our wither-journalism confabs limits our ability to understand how they value their news experiences — which is different, I’m learning, than how they value news itself.
I heard a few of these voices recently in Ann Arbor, where my Poynter colleague Kelly McBride organized a community conversation about life without a newspaper as part of training provided by the Online News Association.
To her credit, McBride focused on what groups and individuals are already doing to “serve the community” rather than bemoaning the loss of the Ann Arbor News, which shut down on July 23.
Drawing on research she’s done as part of Poynter’s “sense-making” initiative, she described several profiles adopted by news consumers, some of them more traditional or social or partisan than others.
Tony Dearing, editor of AnnArbor.com, the Web site that Advance Publications launched to replace the paper it closed, said the site hopes to “help people develop tolerance for various profiles of getting news.”
Much of the discussion involved the role a newspaper plays in facilitating in-person discussion — in homes as well as broader communities — in ways that online news might not. Other gaps mentioned by the group included newspaper-as-common-document for the community, the story-telling form of a newspaper article and a popular re-use of newspaper delivery bags.
Julie Weatherbee, who works at the University of Michigan library and posts to a local news site, was among about 30 community members who took part in the discussion.
“What I miss is not necessarily the Ann Arbor News or the news in it but the physical sitting with someone and sharing, having your breakfast and talking,” she said. “The paper became a physical connection between people … and I don’t think (other forms of) journalism are making those connections.”
As a companion to those dining alone in a restaurant, she noted, the iPhone simply doesn’t measure up to a newspaper.
She also said she misses hearing the phrase, “Did you read in the paper last night that…?” She added: “Now there’s no (single) water cooler. There are 80 water coolers, and (visiting them) is very time consuming.”
She pointed out that many people simply don’t have time to do what it takes to fill the gaps left by the paper. As a result, she said they “have simply dropped out” out of the community’s news network.
Ann Arbor District Library director Josie Parker, compared the loss of the printed newspaper to the disappearance of an artifact dear to library patrons of a certain age.
“I have compassion and absolute respect for people who come to me in tears and ask me to bring back the card catalog,” Parker said. “But it’s gone forever. It’s not coming back. And it’s my job to be that messenger.”
“Here’s the new way,” Parker tells people upset about the loss of the Ann Arbor News. “Yes, there’s a learning curve, but your public library is willing help you get through it.
She introduces people to the Ann Arbor Chronicle, the site maintained so relentlessly by married watchdogs Mary Morgan and Dave Askins, to AnnArbor.com and to other local sites.
“We can talk about what we miss and what we need until they have more time to pull it together,” Parker said of the successor sites. “We’re going to have to be patient and tolerant and let them know what they’re getting right and what they’re getting wrong.”
In addition to the library, Advance is hoping that community members show up in person at AnnArbor.com’s offices for help with the transition to new forms of news.
Dearing, whose office looks out on the colorful sign atop Google’s Ann Arbor facility, said AnnArbor.com hopes to open its storefront gathering place soon.
“We won’t sell any Skinny Vanilla Lattes, but we will set it up like a coffee shop community and our community team will work down there all the time,” he said.
Andy Brush, who serves as Washtenaw County’s Knowledge Manager, said he misses seeing copies of the Ann Arbor News “dropped in front of all my neighbors’ doors — everybody had a baseline of information.”
He said he also misses the plastic delivery bags he re-purposed on walks with his dog.
Liz Margolis, director of communications for the local schools, noted that the same reporter who covered the schools for the Ann Arbor News is on the beat for AnnArbor.com. But she said she finds his online stories “not as in-depth,” and she said many of the comments attached to the articles are “truly destructive and ugly.”
Sherry Turkle, a noted MIT professor who studies the impact of technology on daily life, has examined the evolution of story form from print to online.
“The media theorist Clay Shirky has said that society doesn’t need newspapers; it needs journalism,” Turkle said in remarks prepared for a conference sponsored by the Carnegie Foundation and the Shorenstein Center last week. “So, Shirky continues, we need to shift our focus from saving newspapers to saving journalism.
“I’m all for this. But there is a problem in this admirable formulation. Something is left out. Newspapers create the reading space that journalism occupies. Teenagers tell me that they cannot bear to watch black and white movies. This raises a question: Will we be able to read narrative journalism when we don’t have newspapers?”
Melinda Henneberger, editor of Politics Daily on AOL, offered one answer. She told the Carnegie-Shorenstein conference that her site drew 6 million unique users in October, adding: “Some of the stories that have done best are 3,000 words long.”
In Ann Arbor, Margolis said the school board has hired a former Ann Arbor News reporter to produce a newsletter she hopes will fill some of the gaps.
Dearing said education reporter David Jesse “covers the hell out of the schools” for the Web site, just as he did for the paper. But Dearing acknowledged that the online format favors shorter, more frequent updates as opposed to longer stories, with background material linked rather than included in the stories themselves.
“We’ve only been around three months,” Dearing told the group, “but we have a long-term commitment.”
“The whole point of this thing,” he added, “is to save journalism.”
Alice Ralph, a community activist and regular contributor to Dearing’s site, offered a quick edit: “The reason I’m here is not to save journalism — but to save democracy!”
CORRECTION: Julie Weatherbee was incorrectly described in an earlier version of this report as a librarian and as a founder of Arbor Update.
