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INTRODUCTION Local Journalism on the Brink The Crossroads In August of 2000, a hoary political institution—the Republican National Convention , assembling in Philadelphia—confronted a new kind of media network. As the national Republican Party descended on the city in the summer of 2000, its delegates were met by hundreds of convention protesters carrying cell phones, videocameras, and old-fashioned pencils and paper notebooks, all calling themselves reporters and all networked into a website that displayed reports from the street protests as news broke. Growing out of the World Trade Organization protests in Seattle in 1999 and expanding to several other American and European cities in the months that followed, these Philadelphia protester-reporters identified themselves as members of the Independent Media Center of Philadelphia (also known as the Philly IMC) and promised their readers overtly biased political reporting, by amateurs, directly from the scene of anti–Republican National Convention protests. As the political protesters clashed with Philadelphia police on the convention’s second day—“thousands of roving demonstrators and helmeted police faced off in intersections around the city yesterday afternoon,” the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette wrote, “trading blows at some junctures, while in Center City several delegate hotels locked their doors . . . as the two sides sparred for control of the streets”—amateur Indymedia journalists did more than simply comment on the drama as it unfolded. They were instrumental in documenting it online for a mass audience.1 These Independent Media Center volunteers were among the first group of digital activists to directly pose the question of who counted as a legitimate journalist in an era of low-cost, digital information gathering and distribution. Six years later, at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania, a few of the radical reporters who had first stormed the journalistic barricades during the Republican Convention in 2000 sat down with local bloggers, newspaper editors, cable television executives, and new-media 2 Introduction thinkers to plot a future for local news. The pace of the changes buffeting journalism , changes that first announced themselves in dramatic fashion during coverage of the 2000 convention, had only accelerated in the intervening halfdecade since the Republican National Convention. “Do-it-yourself journalism” was no longer a practice confined to political radicals and anarchists. It had manifested itself as part of a “war-blogging” revolution, a “mommy-blogging” revolution, a YouTube revolution, a MySpace revolution, a flash mob revolution, a “hyperlocal citizens’ media” revolution, and in hundreds of other trends that lacked only a catchy moniker. Perhaps more ominously, the first signs of deep economic distress inside the news industry had begun to filter out of Philadelphia ; in late 2005, the Knight-Ridder news chain, which owned both daily newspapers in Philadelphia (and had, for decades, posted double-digit profit margins ), announced it was breaking itself up and selling its multiple media assets. In the face of the citizen media explosion and these distant economic rumblings, the Annenberg meeting was nothing like the occupational uprising in 2000 that saw radical journalists eviscerate the “lackeys of the corporate press” and professional journalists snidely dismiss their scruffy, decidedly non-objective challengers . Instead, participants in the oddly titled Norgs [new news organizations] Unconference” came together, in their words, “in a spirit of cooperation . . . to save local news in Philadelphia.”2 The Norgs Unconference was one of the first meetings explicitly to raise the question: could traditional journalists and the new breed of professional-amateur hybrids work together to improve local journalism?3 On February 22, 2009, three years after the Norgs Conference, a decade after the earliest meetings to plan a global Indymedia news network, and twelve years since the first newspapers in Philadelphia went online, the journalistic center finally collapsed. Philadelphia Media Holdings, the local ownership group that had purchased the city’s two leading news institutions—the Philadelphia Inquirer and the Philadelphia Daily News—amid much hope, goodwill, and optimism, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. The news was first broken by a local blog, analyzed breathlessly on Twitter, and reported (hours later) in lengthy, accurate depth by the bankrupt papers themselves.4 For more than a year, the newspapers labored in a kind of Chapter 11 twilight zone, as local ownership fought a desperate rearguard action to maintain their financial control over their ailing media properties. In April 2010, these efforts were finally thwarted, with the newspapers becoming one of several media outlets across the United States controlled by banks and post-bankruptcy hedge funds. Yet even as...

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