Jane Stevens: Mini-metros will replace metro newspapers

Jane Stevens predicts residents of at least one metropolitan area will wake up sometime with the next 12 months and realize that the daily newspaper that they received news from for years is no longer there.

In its place “mini-metros” will form where metros once reigned supreme, Stevens said. These mini-metros will be niche products run by a small team that focus on part of a metro area. These products will focus heavily on core local issues like schools, government, roads and health. Perhaps the biggest change from the metro model will be how these mini-metros will incorporate beat blogging as part of their core product.

They won’t just report on the community — they’ll be apart of it. Input and information from citizens will be vital to the success of these mini-metros. They’ll be built around a collaborative model.

For Stevens, Web journalism demands a greater degree of interactivity, and larger papers that fail to deliver this will fall to those that are more interactive, often being local and/or topic-based.

Stevens highlighted four elements that news organizations will need to be relevant in the future: creative storytelling, social networking, beat blogging and basic essential information, such as schedules, maps, and other need-to-know information, depending on the topic.

She cites the example of West Seattle Blog, a site run by former print journalists that welcomes contributions from readers and is ultralocal in its coverage.  These blogs include “serial” reporting on certain issues: they’ll update every hour on a certain event as things go on.  They can serve their communities well on local issues of schools, roads, health, local arts and public policy.

They can also serve their community’s small businesses by providing advertising space.  As many of the larger papers have become corporatized and bought out, Stevens noted that small businesses have often gotten priced out of advertising space to larger corporations like Budweiser. Local blogs like West Seattle can give the little guys better attention.

Stevens has been covering computer innovations for decades, and she headed the San Francisco Examiner’s computers column when it first began in the early 1980s.  Over the years, Stevens stayed up to speed with new media and she became dissatisfied with how news organizations used the Web.

“They just took everything that they had put in print and copied it onto the Web,”  Stevens said. “It was shovelware.”

Stevens didn’t understand why news sites were creating separate sections for multimedia content. She believed then and now that all possible media — text, video, audio and more — should be weaved together as the story demands.

“With web journalism it’s all about the storytelling, not just the writing,” Stevens said.

She noted Luis Sinco’s “Marlboro Marine,” a commendable portrait of an Iraqi Marine veteran struggling with his demons online at mediastorm.org.

“You figure out the best medium or mediums for the story, and if your story’s good enough, they won’t even be conscious of the medium when they’re watching it,” Stevens said.

Interweaving media is one of many benefits Stevens sees in online journalism.  On her site rejurno.com, she spreads a positive view of the future of journalism.  She says the future belongs to “jurnos,” an Australian term for journalists that Stevens has appropriated for the future journalist.

“A jurno goes beyond the traditional I write-you read kind of journalist,” Stevens said. ” They’re part storyteller, part community manager, organizer, watchdog, fact-checker and mythbuster. They are really there to serve their community, whether it’s a topic-based or geographical community.”

This year, Stevens is working at the Donald W. Reynolds Journalism Institute (RJI) in Missouri on two major projects: first, her team there has created the RJI Collaboratory Network, which Stevens describes as an “incubator” for start-up news organizations that want to use social networking and beat blogging technology.  Second, her classes are constructing a health site for the city of Columbia, Missouri. Rather than just looking for trendy health stories, the site will examine the major public health risks in Columbia and investigate the residents’ biggest health concerns, using all the media and interactive technology at their disposal to make the site creative and relevant.

Stevens is optimistic about the future of journalism.  She sees the Web as forcing us to be intimately involved with the people we serve, and that intimacy forces us to be public servants as much as creative artists.