Military Editors

Installation newspapers are essentially town newspapers, and they are suffering from the same loss of readership and advertising as their civilian counterparts. The TechCrunch blog yesterday covered a presentation proposing one model for the survival of local journalism.

Don’t worry, though. Media consultant, blogger, and CUNY professor Jeff Jarvis has a few ideas for how to replace the local newspaper with new business models for news at the hyperlocal level. He just gave a presentation at an Aspen Institute forum on journalism today (live stream).

His answer is to organize local bloggers and citizens into a metro-wide network in each of the top 25 markets, and sell local ads across their sites. Each hyperlocal site would remain independent but join a loose federation for ad sales, distribution, and shared costs. Jarvis sketches out what a new news organization might look like at the local level, and goes out on a limb by offering actual spreadsheets showing some assumptions about audience size and how the business model would work. There is also a spreadsheet for doing this through a non-profit.

The comments (and emperical evidence) suggests people now use “hyperlocal” blogs as a source of community news. Perhaps this is the new model for on-post journalism as well. Our larger installations, already divided into communities with “mayors,” might set up a network as Dr. Jarvis describes. The role of the command (internal) information officer would be trainer, reviewer, advocate and enabler of these community blogs. There’s possibly room for a Civilian Enterprise model here.

Read the whole post and comments at Jeff Jarvis Tries To Save Local News (With Spreadsheets!)