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6 Dark Days and Green Shoots (2009–2011) A s the first decade of the twenty-first century drew to a close, the Philadelphia media ecosystem seemed to be perched a knife’s edge between rebirth and collapse. While earlier parts of this book alluded to the various pressures affecting the professional status and occupational stability of journalists and journalistic organizations, this chapter explicitly discusses exogenous factors reshaping journalistic work: the encroachment of web metrics into formerly autonomous journalistic practices, the increasing precarity of newswork (as the number of digital content producers increases and the ability of news organizations to extract revenue from advertising declines), and the fragility of modern informational institutions. The chapter, however, does not end in despair. The second half chronicles the bankruptcy’s aftermath, from 2009 to 2011, when a new group of innovators struggled to network the Philadelphia media ecosystem on their own terms and a reborn Philadelphia Media Network attempted to retrofit its legacy newspapers for the web era. Even these reborn practices and institutions , however, face the strains on newswork that this chapter chronicles; they cannot escape the factors that humbled earlier institutions in the Philadelphia news ecosystem, as my discussion of post-bankruptcy stress and instability at Philly.com shows. While the future of local journalism remains to be written, it is likely that the structural factors discussed below will continue to shape efforts to network the news in Philadelphia and elsewhere. Strains on Newswork: Audiences, Web Metrics, and the Reshaping of Journalistic Autonomy The authority of journalism has been based, in part, on professional autonomy to decide what makes the news.1 This professional autonomy is under increasing strain, however, as audiences exercise their own digital freedom not only to create their own informational content but also to gain access to a wide range of 134 Chapter 6 unbundled informational options. One aspect of this increase in the influence of the audience is deeply technical: newsrooms are making use of seemingly transparent web metrics that confront professional journalists with the judgment of the audience on a daily or even hourly basis.2 News organizations are rethinking what audiences are and the role audiences should play in deciding what is news. The behavior of these audiences is captured, quantified, and allowed to shape what news is determined to be important. For journalists I observed during my research—journalists used to basing their professionalism on their own autonomous , insulated news judgments—this was a profoundly stressful change. The most obvious change in journalistic attitudes could be seen in the daily rhetoric that newsroom workers and managers directed toward their online audiences. During my time at Philly.com and the two Philadelphia newspapers, I noticed an increasing emphasis on the creativity and autonomy of journalistic audiences. I also noticed, however, a tension between the image of the audience as articulated by editors, website consultants, and executives (who waxed overwhelmingly positive about audience creativity, generativity, and empowerment) and the attitudes of reporters, which were far more conflicted. When discussing a redesign of the Philly.com website, for instance, consultants with the firm Avenue A Razorfish summed up the new attitude toward Internet consumers prevalent in much of the marketing end of the news industry. “Philly.com should do what only the web can really do,” one consultant told me. “Brands across the board have shifted. You can’t push from the mountaintop anymore. . . . Unless you let your users have some kind intimacy with the brand, and maybe even some control, you’re going to fail. They have to play with it. It has to be ‘of the people, by the people, for the people.’”3 The web audience, in short, was seen as a generative one. It was active and had needs and desires. Journalists could no longer assume that their readers were entirely passive. A newsroom manager also took pains to emphasize to me that Philly.com needed to be a useful website in addition to simply an informative one. “I think news people care about a whole pile of headlines, but I think that what we were trying to get in our website was more like, ‘What would help people plan their lives in Philadelphia and live their lives in Philadelphia?’ So that, yeah, you want to know what the mayor has done, but you also want an idea of what’s going on in town tonight, what’s going on this weekend, what you can do with your life. Audiences are active...

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