The Future of News

The first article that I read was a blog post by Ryan Sholin titled, "Links that Redefine News." It was very interesting because it featured different on-line news sources that are available, besides the normal "gloom and doom" stories. The link that I particularly enjoyed was to a website-"EveryBlock". This website listed events and important things that were going on city by city. I looked at the San Jose link and it mentioned San Jose City Council members and the re-voting of them, as well as documentaries that were being premiered. It's cool to get such a range of what is going on in our cities. Websites like this will hopefully decrease the amount of horrible news we always hear, and give us more of a variety of news around our area.

The other blog post that I read was also by Sholin and asked if we were making the right decisions about on-line journalism revenue. It dealt with smaller, web-based news networks and how their funding should be pursued. He mentioned three main ideas: local advertising, freemium classifieds, and community-funding reporting.
First off, local advertising would be effective because if it is a smaller new source based in one community, local businesses would be more likely to advertise because it targets people around in the area of the business.
Secondly, freemium classifieds describes the idea of allowing new customers to use five free advertisements. That way, if they just want to sell something small, they won't have to pay for it. But if they wanted to continue the service, they would have to pay.
Lastly, community-funding reporting refers to the idea that the community would pay the newspaper because they would be reporting about things that are around them. These news stories could be missed by other news sources that have a larger range of coverage.
Hopefully these three ideas will increase the amount of smaller, on-line newspapers that focuses on communities and would also give us more of a variety of news that we care about.