New York Times Local Blog Network Provides Good News Among the Bad

Among the unfortunate missteps (Newsday wants to charge for content; Hearst wants to build its own e-reader) and genuine misfortunes (Rocky Mountain News closes) in the publishing industry this week, there was this late-breaking glimmer of promise: the New York Times is expected to launch a local blog network on Monday.

As Jim Schachter, editor for digital initiatives at The New York Times, confirmed in the comments of the TechCrunch story, the two pilot sites will be staffed initially with full-time Times reporters and the paper will sell ads to local businesses. The neighborhood blogs will cover “cultural events, bar and restaurant openings, real estate, arts, fashion, health, social concerns and anything else that goes on in the ‘SoHo of Brooklyn.’”

The good news is that this could be the beginning of a local collaboration network that online news organizations can provide the platform for. It’s one of the rules that Jeff Jarvis lays out for newspapers in his excellent book, What Would Google Do? Newspapers can provide the tools and raw material for neighbors to gather and share news, and then sell ads to local merchants to support those efforts.

The bad news is that it’s still primarily an advertising-supported model, and in these harsh economic times, that’s a hard way to make a living. At BusinessWeek, Sarah Lacy reports that local interactive advertising is headed for a big slowdown this year, according to Borrell Associates, an online advertising researcher.

UPDATE: Schachter provides some more details in the comments below: “Our Brooklyn site will be collaborating with Jeff Jarvis and the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism. CUNY students will do outreach to residents of Fort Greene and Clinton Hill, extending them the tools and skills of journalism so they can cover their own community.”

Very promising stuff — I look forward to watching this grow — jb