Many of these reporters, I imagine, would be much more willing to invest in that reporter-editor relationship, because they're wanting more out of it all than those sending in their weekly press releases. This second type of reporter would probably jump at the chance to receive free ongoing training from professional journalists, to get assigned to do specific stories, to have their articles cleaned up and polished to the point of being worthy for a huge audience. Like I said, a certain amount of them would be gunning for editorships, so would almost see their reporter duties as an internship, worthy of almost full-time work. And of course there are some of us who would simply love having an excuse to run around acting like a reporter, filing interesting articles about interesting neighborhood things, that we wouldn't have a chance to research if we didn't have a name like Chicagosphere behind us, opening doors for us.

If executed in the right spirit, editors would have a chance to profoundly develop their particular pool of reporters, into the same malleable staff that a group of professionals would have at an old-style paper. It would in effect turn each of the 20 pages into a full yet miniature publication of its own - with its own hard news, its own sports section (in this case for neighborhood high-school scores), its own weather forecast, its own op-ed section and letters to the editor (with an emphasis on neighborhood aldermen and political micro-issues), its own entertainment and events calendar, its own longer features on quirky interesting neighborhood things, its own business section, even its own section in the classifieds. And then each page would also have its own small but fiercely loyal, fiercely dedicated readership - those in that neighborhood, that is, who would hopefully form an attachment to their page like small-towners do to a small-town paper, where their friends are being mentioned (hell, their friends are the reporters), there is news about stuff literally happening down the street,etc.

Ah, but see, this is the genius of Chicagosphere - that it's a "long tail" type business, where small groups are forming intense loyalties based on a ridiculously specific type of information they and only they are seeking, but added together create this huge mass that advertisers salivate over. Take what you could do with the front page of a place like Chicagosphere, for example - where these hundreds of articles getting filed each day literally would let you create a city-wide publication on the site's front page, one that could legitimately compete with places like the Trib and Sun-Times in terms of breadth of coverage. And this would be simple enough - just make it part of the duties of these neighborhood editors, to pass along articles to the senior staff that they think would have greater appeal, with that senior staff in charge of compiling the front page's content.

So let's just take a recent event in the news here, for example, to show how a place like Chicagosphere could cover it, how everyone involved would benefit from it, and how if done correctly, it actually could compete with an "all professional" publication like the Tribune. Take, for example, that fuckin' jumbo jet that skidded off a runway at Midway Airport here last night, which just had all the local journalists coming all over themselves, getting this chance to air just hours upon hours of footage of this giant-ass plane sprawled across a highway. At Chicagosphere, for example, a certain amount of your reporters would undoubtedly actually live next to the airport, so there's that at least - real-time text, photo and audio reports from the actual accident, long before any of the other news organizations can get there, getting fed almost live to the website through cellphone 'moblogging' software that already exists. And these reporters might even get a scoop, you never know, if the plane happened to have skidded into their car or home, or they were otherwise naturally located somewhere that the press would otherwise not be allowed to enter.

After the excitement wore down, then, you could have your hard-news specialists in that neighborhood hunker down and write a systematic series of reports on it all, like what you might see in the Trib the next day. And this would of course run on the neighborhood page, but then also get bumped up to the front page as well. And then this just does a whole bunch of things at the same time as a result: it gets the news out to the general readership, in a professional way, just like a mainstream news group; it suddenly gives that budding journalist a lot more exposure, an entire city's worth as a matter of fact; it gets him noticed by the senior staff if he does a particularly great job, possibly paving the way for a future paid editorship; it gets more people in the neighborhood checking out that neighborhood's page at the site, inspiring more people to want to become citizen reporters themselves. And meanwhile, it gives you everything a major news group spending ten times more money than you has as well - real-time multimedia, comprehensive coverage afterwards, written objectively and with confirmed unrelated sources. And like I said, sometimes it would produce things the Trib wouldn't be able to get, even with their millions of dollars and hundreds of reporters and fleet of satellite vans.

So hell yeah, I think something like Chicagosphere could be a huge success, if actually implemented in the way I'm talking about. In fact, last year when I was going through my career transition, after I had decided to stop pursuing a career as a writer but before I had decided on a new career, I gave a lot of serious consideration into doing just what I've described above, instead of trying to open this arts center that I did finally decide on. I mean, that's how firmly I believe a project like this could work, and garner a zillion readers and a zillion paid ads, and easily pay the salaries of everyone involved while still growing with each year.

Oh, and shit, I have even more thoughts about all this as well, like how in time such a group could even start publishing a regular 24-page paper tabloid of its own, distributed the same places you find the Onion and the Reader, turning it into a legitimate media empire that really is now competing with a company like the Trib. But I'm out of space, so I guess it'll wait for tomorrow.