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FOR THe FIRST TIMe IN HISTORY, MORe Americans are getting their news from the Internet than from traditional newspapers. That was one of the findings issued last week in the “State of the Media,” an annual report by the Project for excellence in Journalism. “In a media world where consumers decide what news they want to get and how they want to get it, the future will belong to those who understand the public’s changing behavior and can target content and advertising to snugly fit the interests of each user.” In other words: micronews. Then, of course, there’s the collapse of the traditional newspaper industry. Ann Arbor, Mich. — home to the University of Michigan — has a population on par with Orleans Parish, with about 350,000 people living in the Ann Arbor metro area. It’s also the first American city of its size not to have a daily newspaper. In 2009, the 174-yearold Ann Arbor News was closed by its owner, Advance Publications (publisher of, among other papers, The TimesPicayune). Declining ad revenue was cited
as the cause. In its place arose AnnArbor. com, a news website that prints a companion newspaper twice a week: a sort of macro-micronews site. Micronews sites are flourishing around the country, says Jessica Durkin, who studies hyperlocal news operations as a Knight media policy fellow with the New America Foundation. Durkin was a reporter for the Scranton (Pa.) Times-Tribune until she was laid off in 2009. “I was one reporter covering five towns, which wasn’t unusual,” she says. “You can’t be everywhere, and so much gets lost.” Durkin thought about setting up her own local news website, but the more she read other micronews websites from around the country, the more interested she became in the phenomenon itself. Her interest led to her own site, In Other News (www.inothernews.us), an online directory of micronews websites — what she says is “a website tracking a compilation of online, independent journalistic start-ups in the wake of legacy media layoffs and industry shrinkage.” Durkin has found dozens of them across the country, many staffed by former journalists who left “legacy media” due to either layoffs or general disgust. That describes both Morris and Hill. He worked at various papers around the country, doing a variety of editorial jobs, before landing at the Houma Courier after Hurricane Katrina. Hill, whose background is photojournalism, arrived at the Houma paper around the same time. But both felt drawn to New Orleans, and they hatched a plan for a website that would cover just one neighborhood as rigorously as they’d covered anything else. Uptown Messenger debuted in November 2009. Like Gambit and many other newspapers, Morris and Hill adhere to the ethics standards set forth by the Society of Professional Journalists, but neither is a member of the Louisiana Press Association or New Orleans Press Club. “We’d rather pour the money back into the site,” Morris says. Hill also sells ads for Uptown Messenger, which is a no-no in the traditional newspaper world but a fact of life at most hyperlocals. Hill says the ads she sells serve a community-service purpose as well as a financial one; when she had tried in the past to market her own wedding-photography business with banner ads on traditional newspaper websites, she found it cost-prohibitive. On Uptown Messenger, it costs a business $100 to have an ad featured for a month. Durkin says it’s not an ideal situation to have journalists selling ads, but nothing in journalism is as clear-cut as it used to be. “There are discussions among the publishers (of these sites),” she says. “But page 12
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ciency and immediacy than newspapers, while big-city dailies, weeklies and local TV stations cover the local stuff. But none of them have the ability (or, these days, the staff) to pinpoint individual neighborhoods well. That’s where hyperlocal news comes in — on the theory that a car prowl on your block, the opening of a new restaurant down the street, or a charity car wash at your nearby synagogue is both news you can use and news you’re not going to get anywhere else. That’s what Morris and Hill strive to provide their readers. “School board meetings, things like that, aren’t going to be of interest to everybody in the city,” Hill says. “But for parents with children at that school, it’s very important.” Recent stories on Uptown Messenger include an account of the city cleaning vacant lots Uptown, controversy over a corner store seeking an alcohol-sale permit and photo galleries of St. Charles Avenue Mardi Gras parades. On Mar. 17, the site printed a story of vital interest to Uptowners: a sharp spike in the number of rape cases reported to the police in the 2nd District, which covers much of Uptown. “I think the core of what we want to do is just sort of public life — public safety is very important, particularly in New Orleans,” Morris says. “We don’t have guidelines,” Hill says. “We’re able to publish as much as we want. What I love that we’ve been able to do is report on the emotional side of things — how a murder is affecting a family. Stuff like that.”
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