Can the Web really take up the slack? Someone in Vancouver asked himself that question five years ago and decided to find out. David Beers didn’t invent the business model for the Tyee—a mix of investments, grants, public contributions, and ad sales—and it’s not unique. What might be is the role in its inception played by public indignation—people in Vancouver wanted better than the mainstream media were giving them and they were ready to support someone who offered to supply it.
I’m wondering when such an eruption will take place in Chicago. The most passion I detect comes from sneering ex-readers on media boards listing the papers’ sins and shrieking good riddance.
Until he left it in 2001, Beers was both a columnist and the features editor of the daily Vancouver Sun, which he describes as British Columbia’s “newspaper of record,” the paper with the money and space to meticulously cover the region—or pretend to. The Sun was, and is, owned by a massive conglomerate, and Beers calls it stiflingly conservative. “Canwest owned the three newspapers of record in southern British Columbia, plus the far and away largest TV news station,” says Beers. “It owned the largest Internet portal and most of the community weeklies. And Canwest overreached. It insisted that its papers run editorials released by headquarters in Winnipeg or the publishers would be fired. People were aware of the cost to society of this. So the people were polarized, and there was a pent-up hunger for this.”
Beers explains, “What we did was sort of unpacked what the newspaper of record has been.” It’s been the sum of many parts, among them entertainment listings, lifestyle columns, and service pieces. “And all that coexists with the serious discussions about holding power accountable, helping civil society work through its next steps.” To Beers, this was the part that really mattered, and he saw shrinking newspapers throwing it over the side.
source: http://www.chicagoreader.com/features/stories/hottype/081211/