Our New Lives as Journalists

          What would you do if the newspaper or magazine or TV station that employed you as a journalist no longer had enough money for your salary?  That's the situation, more or less, faced by hundreds if not thousands of bright, highly skilled reporters and editors. Some are quitting the profession, others are reinventing themselves in a variety of unusual ventures made possible by the Internet and digital technology. Several of the latter described their migration at the Knight-Wallace Fellows reunion in Ann Arbor on Saturday, Sept. 11.
          Rona Kobell left the Baltimore Sun earlier this year to work for the Chesapeake Bay Journal, a small monthly dedicated to mostly environmental issues. In an earlier chapter of her career, prior to the financial meltdown of dailies, Kobell would be covering the subject as an environmental specialist for the Sun. Some percentage of Sun readers -- maybe large, maybe small -- were interested in the environment and read the relevant stories. The Sun had no accurate idea how many or who they were.
          But with digital technology, identifying and reaching the specific readers who care passionately about the environmental health of Chesapeake Bay -- and will read a special-interest publication -- is becoming as cheap and simple as starting a Facebook page for fans of the Chesapeake Bay.
          Audiences for narrow subjects and special-interest publications have long existed -- but finding them, getting their email addresses, figuring out exactly in what form they want information, how much they might pay, how often they will read, has never been easier or as cost-effective.
         The Bay Journal isn't lucrative, at least not yet. As a non-profit publication it accepts federal money from an EPA interested in learning what the voters near the bay see, know and think -- a big conflict, as we were taught in journalism school. But Kobell is free to write what she wants, including articles critical of federal programs.
          A former reporter for the New Orleans Times Picayune, Hayes Ferguson, serves as chief operating officer of Legacy.com, an online venture that collaborates with newspaper websites to write and archive obituaries. Obits have always been a feature of the daily newspaper -- are they morphing into something entirely different, unimagined by an earlier generation of j-school professors?
          Watch out, Woodward and Bernstein -- the news biz is changing before our eyes.