Jeff Jarvis is a fairly interesting guy, even if he’s often criticized as jumping on every single new media bandwagon. Former TV critic, founder of Entertainment Weekly, chief drumbeater of blogging and new journalism models for what feels like forever (hey everybody, can we find some other media experts to quote? There must be at least a couple others out there…), and the director of the interactive journalism program at the new(ish) CUNY Graduate School of Journalism.

As part of the latter duties, he’s quoted in a New York Observer profile about having discovered that Philadelphia doesn’t really need its newspaper reporters:

About a month ago, he organized a CUNY conference that developed models for a new newsroom.

In one session, a group convened concluded that you needed only a few dozen people to cover the entire city of Philadelphia.

“This city used to have 400 in a newsroom, now we have 35,” he said. “Surely that’s not enough to cover news in this community. But! You have the opportunity to create new networks. Which would include, yes, bloggers and freelancers and could also include recently laid-off journalists who can start their own businesses.

35??? With all due respect to ourselves, we’re not doing much investigative reporting ’round these parts. Also, newspapers are a little bit different than Google Reader. The human touch, even when it’s more of a groping maul, as can be the case with our local dailies, is important to contextualizing what’s going on in our little world. And can you imagine what will happen when Phillyist and Phawker report all the city’s news? Shit, they’re already working on it.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 26th, 2008 at 2:10 pm.