jtm-next-newsroom

Tapping into the Baby Boomer retirees: Oldjournalists.com

Oldjournalists.com The Next Newsroom will establish a network of professional journalists who aren’t on staff but who can free-lance for special projects. This group, oldjournalists.com, may have taken early retirement, found other jobs outside the business, or who are simply interested in nurturing and support The Next Newsroom model. What will motivate old journalists? How should they be compensated?

Identifying and training social-network leaders critical

Identify local social networks in the community and have them report their passions. The Next Newsroom’s news coverage plan will be organized around the interests and needs of identified local social networks in a community. The Next Newsroom will map these social networks, identify key participants in these networks, and ask champions from within these to help devise news coverage and gather news from the networks.

Train leaders of local social networks to be better journalists and photojournalists. The Next Newsroom will host training sessions, give seminars in higher-level Web based tools like Microsoft Vista, and offer basic training in Journalism 101.

These Training programs could be organized through a local college or perhaps at a major university. The University of Missouri already has expressed an interest in this project.

Their training would include:

• Understanding social networks;
• Digital advertising, and digital technology;
• Use of electronic  tablets;
• How to write for the Web, photograph, video for the Web, verify for the Web.
• How to develop community databases for content purposes and to sell at a premium;

Three tiers define the professional-amateur relationships

Structure The Next Newsroom around a pro-am model. The Next Newsroom will be structured around teams of professional journalists and community experts who work together to plan and gather local news and local content. To understand how this relationship can work, consider that The Next Newsroom will be organized around three tiers of reporting:

Tier I - High-end enterprise reporting done mostly by professional journalists.

Tier II - Community beat reporting, which is a mix of some professional journalists and some community experts, quality bloggers, and independent community contributors. These pro-am teams will organize and collaborate around key beats and passions in the community.

Tier III - Citizen-generated content that is hyper-local names, faces, calendar events.

Community contributions in Tier III and Tier II will represent at least 50% of all content published.

Skilled professional journalists will focus on higher-end enterprise reporting and supporting key beats closely tied to local interest areas. Their work will represent 25% of the content.

Databases, listings, and freelance/syndicate purchase will provide about 15% of content.