In a time when many newspapers are being forced to fold or retreat to the web, and reporters and newsrooms are being cut at even the best known papers, the proliferation of niche media services is not an altogether surprising trend. Nor is it an unwelcome one in the opinion of many, including New York Times reporter David Carr.
The success of any news publication in their reporting and dissemination of news is contingent on their reliability, depth and breadth of coverage. So, it follows that when a newspaper is forced to cut its staff it is probably also sacrificing some of its “reporting horsepower,” to borrow Carr’s term.
Enter The Texas Tribune, The Gotham Gazette, and the growing force of highly focused boutique media companies using the internet as a medium to get the news out. To many, these sites are the forerunners of the future of journalism. To some, they are seen at best as unreliable and too narrowly focused and at worst as completely skewed and so specific as to be irrelevant.
But the real strength of these online upstarts actually lies in their narrowness of focus. It is unrealistic to expect a small organization to be able to cover a wide range of stories on an international scale in an accurate and cost effective manner, and niche publications understand this. By stringently filtering stories, even if they are of national interest and can easily be reported by the organization (as was the case for The Texas Tribune and the Fort Hood shootings in Carr’s article) the publications gain the advantage of being able to report the stories they do cover with real depth, something many of the larger media outlets have been doing less and less.
This kind of ultra-specific journalism inherently does not have a wide audience. People from Oregon or Italy will probably not be weekly visitors of The Texas Tribune or The Gotham Gazette. But this should not be the measure of the value of these publications. Producing only citizen journalism and “good-for-you, brussel sprouts journalism” is far from a lucrative business strategy, but much closer to the basic theory of what journalism’s function is than what can be seen in some of the larger, more generalized news outlets.
Journalism was not built to be a business, but a system of keeping an eye on things in a more reliable and accurate way than individual citizens are capable of. It is meant to present an unbiased truth to readers, and in doing so to hold accountable all those it reports upon. And when news outlets are cutting coverage, showing bias, and possibly becoming as dependent on their advertisers as they are on their readers, niche media may very well be more of a grassroots return to real journalism than a trend.
David Carr seems to agree. Although he could have done more to cover both the concurrent struggles of large media outlets (which he may have kept low-key because the piece was, after all, written for the New York Times), and other niche media organizations, he does a good job of covering the Tribune and placing it in the context of the larger shifts in the industry. His bias is most obvious in his choice of quotes and interviewees– none who oppose or are critical of the web based niche media movement are present in the story beyond general mention (and are certainly not quoted). Though I agree with Carr’s position, I do think his article could have been made more powerful by mentioning or quoting specific opponents or critics of the movement, rather than glossing over their opinions.