If at the beginning of my career you’d asked me to sketch the Platonic ideal of a journalism career, I’d have probably drawn it this way: College internships lead to a start on the city desk at a small paper, where you spend a year or two learning before making a move up in circulation and prestige, lather rinse repeat, ending up in either a management position at a big-city daily or maybe a juicy writers’ spot as Paris correspondent or chin-scratching columnist, complete with your picture on the side of the delivery trucks.
This suggests how old I am, as well as how many times I’ve seen “Sweet Smell of Success.” Sketches are done in pencil for a reason; the finished picture rarely looks the same.
And so those of us who chose journalism as a career find ourselves in the same boat with millions of others who discovered what happens to the best-laid plans. The Detroit dailies no longer offer seven-day home delivery. Other cities are at risk of losing their newspapers entirely. There are new lines around the eyes of even local TV anchors, as one media outlet after another sees its revenues fall and its audience drift away. “Falling,” “drifting,” “going under”–the jargon suggests the last moments of “Titanic,” with more slipping into the water with every sickening lurch of the deck.
The internet is the iceberg, of course, the tip of which didn’t even begin to suggest the destructive power under the surface. But if you’ll let me to torture the metaphor a little longer, those of us who remain on the ship or alive in the waters surrounding it have gone beyond blame, because how can you blame a force of nature? Our luxurious ship is sinking and we’re clinging to whatever floats, hoping we can stay alive until someone plucks us out of this very cold water.
Which brings us to our little lifeboat, GrossePointeToday.com.
I and my partners, Ben Burns and Sheila Tomkowiak, believe that just because one ship sinks, that’s no reason to give up going to sea. Veteran print journalists all, we believe that people living in communities want, need and deserve quality information. We believe in its power to make life better for everyone. But we also know there’s a reason the ship is on the bottom of the ocean, that the old business model no longer works, and that if GrossePointeToday.com is going to be the news and information source it has the potential to be, it’s going to require a lot more than the three of us.
No news staff, no matter how experienced or well-connected or vast, can cover a community alone. We’re relying on you to tell us what you want to see on our site, and what’s more, we’re counting on you to provide it. One of the miracles of the internet is how easily it connects us, how effortless it makes sharing our lives. Our site is set up to take advantage of that, to make our readers partners in this experiment. This is very much a cooperative experiment. We’re counting on you to tell us which of your neighbors is doing something others should know about, who’s getting married, who died, who has an exciting new business that needs publicity. Tell us if you have a favorite Grosse Pointe blog. Contribute to our reader forums. We welcome other tips, too—e-mail them to submissions@grossepointetoday.com. With so many recently severed and bought-out journalists thick on the ground, we welcome anyone who wants to contribute copy, help with editing or otherwise join us as we figure out web journalism from the ground up.
Our plans are ambitious, but our hopes are high. We’re sorry to see the big ship go down, but this little one floats pretty well, and we’ll say this for it–it’s sure a lot easier to change direction. But we have a lot of water to cross. So grab an oar, and let’s get started.
Nancy Nall Derringer is an editor at GrossePointeToday.com, and blogs most days at nancynall.com.E-mail her at nderringer@grossepointetoday.com
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