Don't Shoot! Local Press Tries to See the Money

Here in Newton we're watching a new high school grow up on the site of the old-old Newton High, the one that pre-dates the current brick fortess that we call Newton North High School. If you live in Massachusetts you've probably heard it derided in the press as an overpriced bungle; at $200 million it is the most expensive high school in the state. Of course, it's a high school that is also a vocational/technical school and community center, but everyone likes to call it just a "high school."

In any case, the local paper wants to photograph the site as part of its reporting. Back when construction began Dimeo, the company in charge, told the Newton TAB that safety prohibited them from allowing a news photographer on site. However, they did agree to supply a photos. The company has followed through on that promise, though while you can view the images here you can't embed them or download them to use on another site. Also, you can't view historical images, just those that the company currently wants you to see. A better method may have been to share them on Flickr and allow all of us to download and use them.

Without going into the whole history of this project, let me just say that "trust" has emerged as a major issue in regards to its building and handling. A failed vote to pause the project held back in January of 2007 hinged on the idea that the process was not transparent and that as taxpayers we needed to better understand what we were buying. Also, current Mayor David Cohen kept promising that the price hikes would stop at about $140 million but they didn't. This project did, in short, cost him both his job and his reputation.

So you can imagine that the TAB and its readers would have a problem trusting the company put in charge of this project, so would prefer someone else to go in and photograph its progress.

The issue came up again recently when the city put on its public meeting calendar that members of the Board of Alderman were going to get a tour. Believing the tour was public, the TAB sent a reporter and photographer, only to be turned away, told that this was a private tour, not a public meeting. Dimeo agreed to provide the TAB with a tour another day, but without a photographer.

Today the TAB asked the Mayor about this issue at his weekly press conference. The mayor responded that the photographs aren't necessary for reporting the story.




This brings up a few thorny questions:

1. Why is it up to Dimeo and the Mayor to decide how the story should be reported? In this environment in which audio, video and text are produced and consumed from handheld devices, how can you put limits on this? In fact, Alderman Ken Parker (who is also a candidate for mayor) used his iPhone to snap a picture and send it to the TAB (picture above). Parker did not, however, challenge Dimeo on its plan to keep the TAB photographer out.
2. Is this type of photography important to the story? The TAB is free to photograph the construction from just outside the site itself, does it need to be on the property to get the real story?
3. Should the TAB get access to a construction site that a typical citizen would not? I'm a photoblogger and media blogger who happens to live in Newton. I don't have the readership of the TAB, but should I get access to the site too in order to shoot some pictures? What about Doug Haslam or Sean Roche, both of whom have strong local audiences? In a tweet the TAB says it would support a "pool" situation, but how does Dimeo handle that kind of situation? Also, what if one of the freelancers with the Boston Globe asked to have access, can Dimo keep the TAB out but let the Globe in?

In my mind, a lot of this comes down to an old-school media relations tactic of trying to "control" the story. Mayor Cohen and his main spokesman, Jeremy Solomon, continue to try to control this story by limiting access. Dimeo, like many construction companies, seems to be trying to control its image by taking its own pictures and only allowing people to view them where the company can control the content.

But in today's enviornment control is only perceived. I still believe the key issue with this whole school is trust and if you're a company that wants people to trust you, then allow the users a little more control over the information and content.

Of course, that's only if you want to build trust.

Gatehouse and Boston.com Reach Agreement

The New York Times Company and Gatehouse Media have reached an agreement on the tussle over whether Boston.com violated fair use in how it links to Gatehouse stories. This is something that has had media watchers on edge for quite a while.

No word yet on what the agreement is, exactly. In fact, the story on the Wicked Local site right now comes from the AP.

Gatehouse v. New York Times

In just a few days the media pundits have jumped on the lawsuit between Gatehouse Media and the New York Times over Boston.com's hyper-local concept. Dan Kennedy is doing the best job at keeping us all updated.

At the heart of the issue is the question of whether Boston.com is simply linking to stories by Gatehouse media's local papers, like the Newton TAB, or if has based its entire business model on using content developed by another commercial news organization.

Adam Reilly has a great take on this when he asks:

Imagine that I decide to start a new, web-only newspaper devoted to the city of Boston. Then imagine I fill my new publication--let's call it the "Boston Gazette"--entirely with links to articles from the Boston Globe. Is that journalistically legit? Nope. It's just a lame, transparent attempt to repackage someone else's work as my own.

It's a fair question and what I believe the Globe is doing right now. Do they have the potential for more? Of course. The problem is that the site, as it stands, spread the information out into a number of different areas. But the main page is only part of the problem.

The Newton site includes a local wiki in which the editors are asking people to submit information, any information and then self-police it. This is a fanciful notion to make a Wikipedia type play, but that's only likely to work if they can also get a number of local overzealous editors.

During the launch meeting one person asked a simple question: what's to stop the Globe from eventually taking that information, restricting access and selling it back to us? The editors assured us this would never happen. Though, that assumes the current editors are always in charge. What happens if and when Boston.com gets sold. Wouldn't another owner look at any repository of information as a potential revenue source?

The editors also noted that any information submitted by an individual remains the property of that individual. OK, that's fair. But what happens when my writeup of Taste Coffee House in Newtonville gets edited by a Globe editor, and then added to by another customer? Who owns the content then? How do you track that ownership?

Jeff Jarvis portrays the Gatehouse folks as ignorant stooges who don't seem to understand how the Internet works. However, as one of the few people writing on this issue who actually LIVES in Newton and also operates a hyper-local site, I have a little better idea of the personalities involved.

It happens that the Newton TAB folks understand new media very well. They are on Twitter, blog regularly and use Facebook all in an attempt to get closer to their readers. They went from being a weekly to having an active local news site with a regular blog long before the Globe even bothered letting readers comment on its own local blog.

This is a group that understands the implications of what it's doing. But it also knows the economic realities of the situation. If a local business is looking to spend money advertising, are they going to advertise with the TAB (and on its online site) or with Boston.com? If Newtonians are flocking to Boston.com/Newton, a site that is made up mostly of content reported by Gatehouse, then the money is going to flow there, plain and simple.

In fact, the entire Boston.com hyper-local operation feels more like an adveristing play than anything else. They created a site, hired a single (very young) editor, then simply reorganized much of its existing content so it focused heavily on one city.

One final very telling note in all this. When Boston.com started rolling out its site it invited a number of local thought-leaders to the Newton War Memorial Auditorium to show it off. This group included a number of bloggers, advertisers, people who have local TV shows and a few others who are well known. The mockup they showed included articles from the TAB in addition to other bloggers, some of who were in attendence, and they even pointed out that they were going to aggregate information from every site, including the TAB.

They never invited the TAB to the meeting. The editors first heard about it when I posted about it on TheGardenCity.net