What happens if the San Francisco Chronicle dies? Tim Redmond from the SFBG thinks no one will give a shit, but a lot of people are concerned that San Francisco might become the first major US city with no local daily. Luckily, San Francisco also happens to be home to some of the worlds leading new media pioneers. Superkiy, a producer at San Francisco- Based Current TV, made this video scoping out some of the locally-based alternatives that are cropping up.
The San Francisco Post-Chronicle is particularly interesting because of it’s unique approach to designing the future of daily local news coverage.. In the words of Post-Chronicle Co-Founder Alexis Madrigal:
The San Francisco Post-Chornicle is a wiki to imagine a digital news source… What do we do if we say ‘we don’t need a printing press, let’s do this all online.’ I think people of this generation got kind of excited about it and started adding new ideas.
Post-Chronicle “collaborators” can offer ideas on how this hypothetical digital daily would operate. From it’s design and content to the actual business model that will support the Post-Chron.
Even if the wiki hasn’t gotten a whole hell of a lot of response so far, I think it’s a really exciting idea to think that journalists and the public might collaborate on creating a digital daily much as people have collaborated on other open source projects.
I agree with the Post-Chron founders’ assumptions that that professional (PROFITABLE) journalism will be the central element of the digital daily because let’s face it: bloggers aren’t reporters… someone needs to do this fulltime.
Still, the single biggest problem with the Post-Chron as with other online news sources is that there still isn’t a revolutionary new business model to drive the world of digital news. So far the Post-Chron collaborators want to drive the revenue stream with advertising. This hasn’t worked yet… but with reduced costs, maybe it would work at a local level. Regardless, for all of the great insights on the Post-Chron, if someone really had the “business model solution”… would they give it away? A profitable business model is worth a lot of money to a lot of people right now.