Finally, someone’s announced a concrete (albeit still liquid concrete) plan to start a new, pro local-news site in town, no matter what Hearst finally chooses to do with the Post-Intelligencer brand.
A group of P-I vets, including reporter Kerry Murakami, are planning a local news site to be partly funded by voluntary reader “memberships.” They’re calling their scheme “the Packers Model,” after the Green Bay Packers’ fan-ownership structure. (The site’s organization may or may not end up emulating the Packers’ system of many small shareholders. It could, instead, be set up as a cooperative or a nonprofit.)
They’re going ahead with this plan without waiting to hear Hearst’s plan. This is good. Hearst is acting exactly within its reputation as one of the nation’s most secretive corporations. It could close the print P-I any day now (or any month now), and could relaunch or scrap the paper’s web site concurrently.
The Stranger‘s Slog team has its collective doubts about the plan, and about the “Packers model.” Why would thousands of individual citizens plunk down $25 a month, or even $25 a year, for a free-access Web site bent on carrying on the P-I legacy without its name?
I’ll tell you why. It’s because, while this new site probably won’t get the P-I‘s name, ad accounts, or archives, it would have some of the paper’s best known staffers. (They don’t know which ones yet; that all depends on whom they can recruit, and whom, if anyone, Hearst keeps around.)
It would be responsible, and responsive, to its stakeholders.
It would cover local/regional politics for readers who really give a darn about local/regional politics. Less heat; more light. More wonky details of the legislative process. More explanations about why we should become interested in, say, Port of Seattle mismanagement or a suburban mayoral race.
This is what I meant last week, when I compared the difference between the new news and the old news to that between microbreweries and the megaproducers of swill lagers.
Like microbrewers, new-news organizations will be smaller but more plentiful. They’ll craft their product with more care. They’ll appeal to a wider range of specific preferences/interests.
And, yeah, most of their product will have a stronger kick.
This “Packers model” team and a rump P-I site could both exist. Or one or the other, or neither.
My wish is for as many “voices” as the Web can carry.
Which, while finite, is a very large number indeed.
