First came the waves of consolidation that swallowed up independent newspapers across the country. Now, as more newsrooms shrink and shutter in the Internet age, the local daily paper may be verging on extinction. But in many communities, a new tide of experimental Web-based ventures is moving to fill in the holes left by declining corporate media. These emerging “hyperlocal” models—ranging from slick news aggregators to more traditional pavement-pounding reporting—focus on a certain geographic area and draw from an array of local sources, like reader announcements, government records and Twitter. Though individual sites aim to capture the peculiarities of the [...]

One thing to keep in mind while worrying about the future of journalism is that its past hasn’t been all that great either. Journalism ought to be judged not on the profits it makes for stockholders but on the service it provides to democracy. By that measure, the reporting profession has been falling down on the job: Leading us into an aggressive war with evidence based on lies (FAIR Media Advisory, 3/19/07), overlooking an asset bubble whose predictable deflation devastated our economy (Extra!, 11-12/08), failing to raise alarms about the erosion of key civil liberties (Extra!, 5-6/08). And it’s not [...]