It’s not easy to be in the news business today. Reuters said recently it will cut its newsroom staff by five percent – a sharp turnabout from two years ago when it was boldly hiring talent from rival news organizations. There are bright spots in the business, but they happen to be far away from the big boxes in New York where many news organizations have entrenched themselves.
To visit the Reuters building in Times Square is to feel you are at the very center of the news universe. Big screens announce the latest news, people scurry from meeting to meeting, and blogs, videos and wire features gush forth around-the-clock.
All this activity makes Reuters quite similar to one of its Times Square neighbors: Disney, whose elaborate stage productions entertain thousands each week. Reuters isn’t exactly producing entertainment, but it is putting on a show of sorts: making news from the “media capital” and sending it out to the world.
The trouble is, news isn’t made in the center any more and hasn’t been for a while now.
When the Reuters headquarters in Times Square opened in 2001 the Internet was still a new thing. Blogs, video sharing and social media were years away. Now, a dozen years later, the building seems like a costly monument to another age. It reflects a highly centralized approach to newsmaking in a world that has become decentralized.
This decentralization has made local news much more interesting and potentially lucrative, if the business model is right.
But that has been challenging for the industry. AOL sharply scaled back Patch, its network of local news sites around the country after it failed to gain traction. Reports put AOL’s losses on Patch at more than $100 million annually. Added to that was the costly embarrassment to CEO Tim Armstrong when he awkwardly fired hundreds of Patch staffers, including one during an all-staff conference call.
Local news is an appealing market. There’s a void created by the shrinkage of major newspapers, and advertisers are hungry for new ways to reach consumers.
One promising example comes from an unlikely source: South Florida. In the humble hamlet of Vero Beach, a local newspaper-and-website – VeroBeach32963 – has made a dramatic impact through old-fashioned journalism and commercial moxie.
Its stories are hard-hitting, relevant and well reported. It has broken scandals at the local electric utility and the hospital system – two prominent civic institutions and big employers. And they’ve had a tangible impact on the community. A story on housing foreclosures led to a fundraising effort to help a local family keep their home out of foreclosure.
It’s hard to know if VeroBeach32963 is making money for its owners, and the cost of putting a print edition on every doorstep in town is surely costly. But it is generating the kind of fracas that most newspapers can only dream about, thanks in large part to its editor, Milton R. Benjamin, a former editor at the Washington Post.
Most of what passes for news on Patch and similar sites is a rewrite of the police blotter and some uneven coverage of local high school sports. That’s not a formula for sustained success. But VeroBeach32963 might just have one.