Patching local news together won't work

By Daniel B. Kline

Good news amateur writers with an inflated sense of your own talent, your local news Web site that nobody reads wants your contributions. Never mind that you have no actual talent – two friends and your mom (who doesn't actually read what you write) told you how much they love your work, so that should clearly result in a mass audience.

Often called “crowdsourcing,” the idea is that the idea that there are lots of local voices just dying to be heard, that people actually want to hear. This concept of turning over your “pages” to amateurs is part of the latest thoughts as to how the newspaper business will be saved/reinvented.

This bit of wishful thinking makes financial sense because actual reporters and professional opinion writers (present company excluded) actually cost money. So, if we can get the public to report and opine for free, then we won't need actual journalists.

Logically, this could work just fine except it's extremely rare to find any actual writing talent willing to participate in this particular scam. Yes, Huffington Post pulls this off, but somehow that site manged to trick celebrities and actual writers to give their work away for free.

When you try this model in hundreds of town across the country, you end up with Web sites populated by amateurs who can't write or tell an interesting story. Basically, this would be like running an upscale restaurant and realizing that the chefs really drive costs up, so you get rid of them and hand customers a pile of ingredients and a stove.

This has not stopped AOL, owners of Huffington Post, from pushing this model on its local Patch sites. In general, these local news sites have one editor who writes, assigns and handles everything else. Some Patch sites have good journalists doing good work, but most feature either overworked, burned out pros or inexperienced kids.

Now, of course, sourcing material from the community has its place. It's not impossible to find or train local talent, but aside from the occasional lucky discovery, doing this requires resources and training. The local news prototype I run has a 16-year-old intern this summer who ranks just a slight tick below my professional staff in quality and vastly exceeds them in output.

To get that intern, however, we made a significant investment in a school program where we teach teenagers how to shoot and edit video. We didn't just hand her a camera and say go report the news, we taught her the skills and then were delighted to find someone with talent who has become a significant contributor.

Simply going on the notion that because a lot of people blog on a local level that there is a log of great, or even marginally acceptable, content which news Web sites can have for free is silly. The “crowd” can enhance your reporting and it can most certainly direct you as to what to cover. But, the idea that the news bus won't be driven by paid professionals will likely end with hundreds of dead local web sites – killed because they thought that just because people are saying something that others would want to read it.

The new newspaper world will feature less walls and more contributions from the audience. Story selection and placement will largely be audience driven and the public will have unprecedented access and control of the what news gets reported. The days of crusty old editors making decisions like J. Jonah Jameson from Spiderman are over, but the day of the professional reporter has just begun.

You can't crowdsource reporting and storytelling anymore than you can crowdsource brain surgery or root canals. Sure, there might be some genius who read a book who can handle either of those, but if I need a brain surgeon or dentist – much like if I need a reporter – I'll stick with the pros.

Daniel B. Kline's work appears in over 100 papers weekly. He can be reached at dan@notastep.com or you can see his archive at dbkline.com. You can listen to his podcast or buy his book, Worst Ideas Ever, at Worstideasever.com.

Stop talking about jobs and start creating them

By Daniel B. Kline

Given the current economy, every politician in the nation likes to give speeches about jobs. They talk about jobs, go on “job tours,” write legislation about jobs and do everything short of writing a Broadway musical about jobs, but, of course, very few actually create any jobs.

Our president also likes talking about jobs and he does seem to understand that it's hard to have a thriving economy with 10% unemployment, but he too has a fundamental lack of understanding as to how jobs get created. Obama plans to create jobs by taking more money away from the public through increasing taxes. (I'm pretty sure he also thinks he can create jobs by being charming and telegenic, but he has not said that out loud).

He, of course, only plans to tax the wealthy – you know, the people who pay nearly all the taxes now; the same people who buy stuff and hire people with their money. He also seems completely unaware that taking money from the public and giving it to the government has multiple negative effects on the economy.

First, government never spends our money as well as we do. Second, when you raise taxes, you remove incentive. Why would a person who already has money risk that cash in attempt to make even more if Uncle Sam will just take the lion's share of the profits?

President Barack Obama isn't interested in creating jobs any more than the blowhards in the Tea Party are. Instead, the extreme left and the extreme right want to demonize each other. The president says we don't have jobs because rich people take all the money while the Tea Partiers say we don't have jobs because the federal government wastes money on entitlement programs.

None of this rhetoric creates a single job – unless you count the talk radio hosts who live off this sort of nonsense. Then, of course, we have the ridiculous debate about the debt ceiling, which has about as much uncertainty as the NFL lockout. We don;t how they will agree or exactly when they will agree, but we all know that at some point an agreement will be reached.

Creating jobs requires that both sides of the political debate drop their rhetoric. Obama has to stop blaming the rich and the Republicans have to stop blaming the poor. We won't create jobs by raising taxes and more than we will create jobs by eliminating food stamps or other needed social programs.

Instead, the right must acknowledge that there are too many loopholes that allow those with the most to escape paying anything – let alone their fair share. The left must accept that government has an awful lot of waste and while some programs can remain, others must go.

To create jobs, we need politicians who actually want to do that instead of ones who just like talking about it. Since we don't have that, it's hard to see an end to our economic downturn. Sadly, to create jobs we need leaders and that appears to be a job opening for which nobody qualified has applied.

Daniel B. Kline's work appears in over 100 papers weekly. He can be reached at dan@notastep.com or you can see his archive at dbkline.com. You can listen to his podcast or buy his book, Worst Ideas Ever, at Worstideasever.com.