KCTS 9 and InvestigateWest have partnered to bring a unique brand of journalism to the Pacific Northwest.

It may seem like an unlikely union: an old-guard public television station paired with a small, online journalism start-up. However, the two share the same commitment to strong reporting and storytelling.

Each organization, said KCTS Senior Producer Ethan Morris via email, brings different strengths to the collaboration: “InvestigateWest’s reporters are seasoned investigative journalists who have a specialized set of skills that literally take years to develop: in-depth research, database analysis, Freedom of Information Act requests, cultivating confidential sources, etc. Our producers have a separate set of skills in visual storytelling. We build our stories around the video and audio we collect with a specific focus on story narrative and arc.”

The first result of this collaboration, a 12-minute video called “Lifesaving Drugs—Deadly Consequences,” aired on KCTS on July 9 and 12; MSNBC, the Seattle Times, NPR and PBS also shared the piece. The organizations plan to collaborate on four projects a year, with a focus on environmental issues.

Carol Smith, Senior Writer at InvestigateWest, sees the collaborative model play a role in the future of journalism: “Collaboration is a way to leverage each other’s resources and talents to get the most eyes and ears possible on stories that matter.” Read more…

Will Richmond (FierceMobile) tackles AntennaGate today. I didn’t see his referenced Steve Jobs quote when I went looking for facts-and-data on Friday, but I think it sums up the state of much of what passes for “news” on the web today:

Sometimes I feel that in search of eyeballs for these web sites, people don’t care about what they leave in their wake.

Read more…

http://www.vimeo.com/11769258

Tracy and her husband Patrick are the publishers of the West Seattle Blog, one of the hyperlocal weblogs that have proved it is possible to make a living from community journalism in a neighborhood or small town. She has been identified as one of the communicators who is finding ways of making sense of news as a business by people like the Poynter Institute — she is part of their Sense-Making Project — and the News Innovation program at CUNY. Read more…

Over the past 13 years, Eat the State! (ETS) has provided Western Washington with left-leaning political commentary as a free bimonthly print journal. However, the weak economy has forced the paper to rethink its business model, and many other small publications are in the same boat.

Last month, after having difficulty meeting a $6,000 fundraising goal, ETS recognized that its current publication model is not sustainable. In the future, ETS will only print endorsement issues around elections. The paper’s last regular print edition will be released April 1. Read more…

The Politico newsroom inside News Channel 8

Every time that I step into a newsroom, I remember what it was like to live off of that electricity in the air when I was at NBC News.  It was the human buzz of stressful inquiry as events incessantly unfolded before our journalistic eyes.

We’ve come to believe that this buzz is much diminished in the waning days of traditional journalism.  But I’m seeing some signs of life as I travel around the northeast this month.

Local TV (Americans’ number source for news) has long been criticized for considering their web presence as an afterthought.  At Washington D.C.’s Newschannel 8, they’re launching a new website in June that will merge their cable news channel with their local station.  And rather than having TV feed the web, the station manager, Bill Lord, told me that the web will feed TV.  It will be text plus video plus citizen journalism all in one place,” he said.  They’ll also be hiring 100 local bloggers.  “We’re flipping the model.”

Read more…

I’ve been thinking about business models for online content (text and images), given Apple’s introduction of the iPad and Amazon’s infamous battle with Macmillan. I’ve argued that digital subscriptions should be less than their analog counterparts, basing my argument in large part on the fact that traditional print is vastly more expensive than digital distribution.

I’ve been wrong. At least in the short run. Read more…

After turning off all site comments on Tuesday, AOL-owned Engadget today flipped the comment switch back on, ending a two-day hiatus resulting from its editors seeing too many comments that were “mean, ugly, pointless, and frankly threatening in some situations.”

Engadget columnist Michael Gartenberg expressed his discontent with the comments that followed his recent iPad editorial in a Tweet: “Amused. Bash me on @Engadget column. Suggest my parents were not married prior to birth, suggest I be fruitful & multiply. enclose your CV.”

With traditional news outlets declining and enthusiast blogs like Engadget on the rise, the implications of closing comments reflect how the stampede of online discourse can sometimes be too much for even mature, full-time blogs to endure. According to Alexa, Engadget today ranks 195 in the nation and 384 in the world for Internet traffic. It recently launched mobile applications for iPhone and Blackberry. It produces its own weekly podcasts and monthly TV shows (Edited per Zack’s comment). This is a full-time media company in all respects and an influential one at that – The AFP wrote a story on Engadget’s comment disabling.

Engadget editor Joshua Topolsky explains why things got out of hand in a Tweet: “I don’t think it’s about the class of the readership, it’s about scale.”

Scale is certainly an issue, but it shouldn’t excuse community behavior. Especially for a technology site like Engadget, you’d think that its die-hard community would be populated by primarily educated (either by trade or academically) and at least civil readers. Surely most are, but what caused Engadget to call “time-out” demonstrates how online media-enabled free speech can unveil the worst in us. Read more…