on reporting local news

I put up 2 stories on Church Hill People’s News last weekend that ended up being picked up by 2 of the local TV stations this weekend. Last Sunday’s Sunny Market now even more gross and Monday’s neighbor vs neighbor became nb12’s City responds to online complaints and wric’s Eyesore Is Piece Of Richmond History, […]

April 19, 2008; 7:41 PM • by John Murden

I put up 2 stories on Church Hill People’s News last weekend that ended up being picked up by 2 of the local TV stations this weekend. Last Sunday’s Sunny Market now even more gross and Monday’s neighbor vs neighbor became nb12’s City responds to online complaints and wric’s Eyesore Is Piece Of Richmond History, respectively. Having the “real media” pick up one of my stories was kind of exciting the first time that it happened and has continued to be a thrill: this means that I am doing something right and that I am adding original info into the RVA mediasphere.

The thing that continues to grate is that the TV stations do not indicate from where they got the story. As a blogger/journalist, I’m very comfortable and familiar with taking a piece of someone else’s work and crafting it into something new. Etiquette in this case is to link back to the original story. Neither of the TV broadcasts gives any credit for the original source for the story, though, aside from nbc12’s clumsy-or-ignorant (you decide!) throwaway line “some Church Hill residents even wrote about it on their blogs on Sunday”.

In my mind, I have a list of local news sources that “get the internet” and those that don’t. Print publications like Style and Richmond Magazine have been the most willing to run with it and have crafted an online presence that reflects and augments their print publications. The RTD is making the transition and has been doing breaking news better and better. Sometimes it seems like nbc12 is trying, but none of the TV stations are more than tentatively engaged with having an online presence. Many weekends the local TV stations won’t update their sites at all. None appear to offer all of their news stories online or allow comments. None make their video embeddable by other sites. In the time of YouTube and the iPhone, wric8‘s video is Windows-only.

I don’t think that the local stations are really spurning CHPN when they don’t give a mention for the source of the stories. It is worse than that — I don’t think that they understand the internet and what this means for the future of local news. Not being owned by corporation and not employing all sorts of reporters and editors best boys and chairpersons or whomever, in their mind CHPN isn’t in any way their equal. If they were biting an RTD story they’d give credit, but not to some grotty blogger. The readers/viewers are making that distinction less and less, though.

With local community news sites still popping up and folks like the Project for Excellence in Journalism saying good things about what we are doing, this is just the beginning of the experiment.