So, I've received a number of nice comments already regarding my thoughts on the future of print journalism, posted here yesterday. (Here are part 1 and part 2, if you missed them.) In particular I've gotten a number of comments about the 'hyperlocal' citizen-journalist online project I was advocating yesterday - I guess because a lot of the other things I was calling for are already pretty well-known (like red tabloids, an online portal for national news and weather, a Craigslist-style classifieds section, etc), but with the idea of a hyperlocal news publication not really flitting into the consciousness yet of a lot of people.

And I'm not claiming to have come up with it myself, either; my ideas on the subject are merely part of the collective group of ideas currently being formed online these days by a whole mass of different people, some of course ridiculously more qualified and experienced at this stuff than me. There are all kinds of different ideas about how to implement such a system, of course, so here is mine in particular - and we'll just give it a hypothetical name to make this easier for me, which we'll call 'Chicagosphere.com,' as a play on Bayosphere.com, a similar experiment that actually does exist for the San Francisco area.

So Chicagosphere would basically break the city down into 20 geographical areas, and give each one a different page at the site, with its own unique URL. (My neighborhood, for example, might be known as "Buena Park / Uptown / Little Vietnam," and be located at uptown.chicagosphere.com.) Each area, then, would have a full-time paid staff member overseeing it all, responsible for everything that appears on its page - some 23-year-old journalist fresh out of school, for example, who would either be doing this after graduation, joining one of those cub-reporter pools, or covering city council meetings for a suburban weekly. And she would have a couple of superiors on the senior staff, of course, overseeing the entire site, and then under her would be anywhere from 10 to 20 volunteer reporters, "citizen journalists" as the buzz term goes, people who actually live in that neighborhood and have a vested interest in seeing as high-quality of material as possible being posted on their neighborhood's page. These citizen reporters actually create all the content for that neighborhood's page, the paid professional journalist manages it all, and a central sales staff sells 'contextual' ads across all 20 mini-publications to their clients. (Like Google's, in other words - like if there's a story about a neighborhood break-in, an ad for a neighborhood locksmith runs next to it.)

And yes, there have in fact been actual experiments on the web already, attempting to implement such a thing; but as usual, I've been disappointed by almost all of them so far, for getting most of it right but then screwing up on one tiny but very important thing. So the first thing I would do, for example, if I were running Chicagosphere, would be to formalize the relationship between citizen reporters and professional editors - to treat it more like a sheriff deputizing his posse than a bunch of random citizens turning in articles. Which, for example, is one of those tiny things I think a lot of these experiments have gotten wrong, that is so crucial to such an experiment's success.

There are two issues at work, really, when it comes to this subject: convincing your audience to consider the stuff at your site as legitimate news; and convincing professional journalists that random citizens can write reliable news. And it really boils down to the same concern, when you think about it - of the complicated ethics code that's in place in that industry, where reporters are supposed to verify a story through three independent sources, not inject their personal beliefs into a story and the like. If you formalized such a process at a site like this - say, require new reporters to go through a two-week training program at your offices, and a refresher/retreat weekend every subsequent year - I think you would go a long way towards succeeding at these issues where other citizen-journalist projects have failed.

And then of course you're teaming them up in small groups with an actual professional, academically-trained journalist, which just provides benefits in all kinds of ways. Instead of that young editor, for example, doing what most young journalists do after school, which is cover fucking Cub Scout meetings or whatever for three years, they're instead assigning stories, reviewing articles, managing an entire section of a newspaper, not only much more interesting but a much better way to fill out a resume. The senior staff, in the meanwhile, is getting all the work of a $60,000 editor for $30,000 instead, so how can they possibly complain? The reporters appreciate the guidance, and the audience appreciates the added professionality it creates to the overall site. There's literally not much of a way to lose in such a situation.

I'm envisioning, by the way, two types of people primarily who would want to go to the trouble of being volunteer reporters. The first kind, for example, would be professionals filing reports on only a specific subject, becuase they have an agenda to achieve - PTA members, neighborhood-watch officers, chamber of commerce people, etc. And this of course is just fine, and something actually needed in a hyperlocal-style publication like this, where you're hoping to get a lot of people checking in each day specifically just for fluffy news like this - what happened at the last school board meeting, what that new store is going to be that's being constructed down the street. And I imagine that these types of reporters would have a more hands-off relationship with that neighborhood's editor; a bunch of them would probably be professional PR people in the first place, who already know how to write a decent press release that sounds like a news article, and would just mostly be filing the same reports they're writing for their jobs anyway, once a week or whatever with not a lot of maintenance needed.

And then of course you'd have the other group, generating most of the content most of your readers are visiting for - those who feel that they have the soul of a journalist beating inside them, if not the lifestyle needed to be a full-time one. And this would include people like: those who were on their high-school newspaper staff, or a reporter in the military, who simply miss it; current journalism students who want some real-world experience, and to be noticed by people with paid jobs to offer; retired Baby Boomers who are currently experiencing their 'rehirement' phase (where instead of settling down they decide to get involved with a brand-new industry, often based on pipe dreams from their twenties during the Kennedy years); and of course all those nerds who are heavy contributors to Wikipedia as well, scholars and smartypants who simply enjoy penning a well-written article (like, er, me, for example), and reveling in how much better they are than everyone else.

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.