Idea Lab

Community News Companies Will Become Extinct

by Richard Anderson
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

The internet has created the need for radical change in the community news business. Incremental changes such as Yahoo consortiums will not be sufficient to stem the loss of print revenue. Consumers do not want to be limited to browsing content provided by legacy top-down, control oriented news organizations. As well, banners and buttons, the online version of double trucks, ROP's and classifieds, do not translate into a value proposition that support feet on the ground reporters. If one reflects on the origins of the Internet - its reason for being - it is not surprising that applying print practices...

• April 11, 2008
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From Community Newspapers to Community Hosts

by Richard Anderson
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

VillageSoup is one of the James S. and John L. Knight Foundation's first year's recipients of a Knight Brothers News Challenge Grant. It is in Gary Kebbel's words, the only single platform, full service projected funded in 2007. I will try in this blog to share a view which will hopefully encourage others to engage the idea of Community Hosts and to share their thoughts and experiences as well. The idea of a new business model for community newspapers formed in 1997 in the coastal Maine community of Camden. The idea was stimulated by the 1997 book Net Gain: Expanding...

• October 14, 2007
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