Blog by Marina City resident ranked in Top 20 Chicago online news publications

Definition of news has broadened, says community media expert

15-Jun-09 – The self-described personal memoirs blog of a Marina City resident has been ranked in the Top 20 of a list of local online news publications.

Mike Doyle’s Chicago Carless blog was ranked 18th in a report by Community Media Workshop. The report was commissioned by the Knight Foundation, a non-profit group dedicated to promoting journalism, and The Chicago Community Trust, which according to its web site awarded $115 million in 2007 to not-for-profit organizations.

“The NEW news: Journalism We Want And Need” is an effort to explore innovations in how information, especially at the local level, is collected and disseminated. It was authored by Gordon Mayer and Community Media Workshop president Thom Clark, who observe that, “overall, local news coverage has been declining for some time and online local news publications, albeit in their nascent stages, have not yet filled the gap.”

Calling the Internet “arguably the cheapest, most democratic publishing medium in history,” the report says “its freedom of expression also means that diverse voices will express themselves in ways that might draw scorn from professional journalists.”

“The space available to produce local news at our traditional print and broadcast news outlets is shrinking. That shrinkage is producing exciting opportunities for the growth of local online news. The good news is, everyone from experts to everyday people identify local news as a crucial need of democracy.”

Describing his blog as “the life and times of a former New Yorker living in downtown Chicago,” Doyle (left, represented in an illustration from his blog) started Chicago Carless in June 2005. He says he “scribes about his Chicago life with brutal honesty.”

“I’ll stick with the approach that works,” says Doyle, a public relations consultant, “writing from the heart about the local issues I care about and reaching out to my community of readers in a spirit of transparent debate. That, and never thinking I have an exclusive license on the truth or other shape-shifting forms of alleged objectivity.”

But is it news?

“I think that news is different things to different people,” says Thom Clark, president of Community Media Workshop and co-author of the report. “I know what kind of news I can use and it may not be Chicago Carless…but it is for some people.”

He says in the new media paradigm, the definition of news has not so much changed but broadened. “Broadened who makes it, who covers it, and who gets to call it ‘news’ as opposed to gossip [or] blather.”

“For the moment, while we re-sort all this…I’m willing to make a distinction between news – which includes [Madonna’s] latest adoption, which used to be entertainment and gossip, not news but now takes up tremendous chunks of newsprint and air time – and reporting and journalism. Somewhere between all those things are opinions and op-eds and perspective.”

Clark says he used think it was sad commentary on the intelligence and curiosity of younger people who relied on John Stewart, host of “The Daily Show” on the Comedy Central television network, as their main source of news. “I have come to respect, quite frankly, the relative intelligence of John Stewart’s opening presentation every night, as compared to Jay Leno or David Letterman. You have to know a lot about what’s going on in the world to get the joke. While I’m not quite ready to say it’s news, I understand why my daughter thinks she’s getting news. Because it’s sardonic, skeptical, one might even say a cynical point of view. It’s a bit more honest in some respects than what we’re getting from traditional broadcast news.”

The relevance of personal blogs to the media landscape may be fleeting. “People might be entertained by Chicago Carless or other personal blogs for awhile. Whether they sustain an audience will be largely dependent on whether people continue to find entertaining, useful content.”

Thom Clark (left) is also a part-time professor of journalism at Columbia College in Chicago.

Clark says he wanted to put the report out there and see how people reacted. “The discussion it’s generated since – that was our real hope. That people would disagree. That people might find solace. That if they were further frustrated, they might do something about it.”

A web version, he says, will go live this week, with more articles, graphs and data.

“We have indeed heard from a few people – not that many – who we missed,” says Clark. “We’re hoping to take care of that by continuing to have a ‘live report’ on the web. Whether we come back and re-do [the report] remains to be seen, although there is some momentum around here to at least re-do parts of it on some kind of periodic basis because it is an ever-changing landscape.”

Community Media Workshop, which ranked itself in the number 21 spot, says it looked at nearly 200 “online news sites, blogs or e-newsletters serving the Chicago region.”

The top-ranked sites were Chi-Town Daily News, Windy City Media Group, and Gapers Block.

Web sites:

• Chicago Carless
• The NEW news: Journalism We Want And Need