What old media can learn about doing good journalism in the twenty-first century from Voice of San Diego

An alternate title to this post could be: Why Emily Alpert rocks.

Alpert, a UChicago alumn, shared stories from her recent days reporting in Oregon, Gilroy, CA and now in San Diego at a revolutionary local non-profit, with students in the Chicago Careers in Journalism Program yesterday afternoon.

Here are some of the thoughts she left me with on the benefits of a non-profit, investigative journalism model like Voice of San Diego, the web-publication where she serves as the education reporter. I'm excited.

*Problem with the old media model: Daily beat reporters are pressured to produce copy every day, and as a consequence have less time for deeper, long-term projects.

Solution at Voice of San Diego: What's different about this web-only publication from a paper like the San Diego Union-Tribune (where I interned last year) is not content per se, but the method of delivery. With the internet, Voice can break news immediately, rather than waiting for publication.

*Problem: How to find new and unlikely sources and story ideas in a mid-sized community like San Diego?

Solution: Reporter Blogs. With her Voice of San Diego blog, Alpert said, in addition to breaking news quickly to her audience of parents, teachers and school administrators, she can have ongoing conversations about education issues via the readers' comments. She told one story about the photo editor, who snapped a photo of a weird, blackened object on the beach and posted it to his blog, asking readers, "What is it?" The mystery brought dedicated readers back to the blog as people offered suggestions and asked the photographer for more information. Eventually he learned that it was a dead sea urchin—and that environmental scientists in San Diego are trying to figure out why many are dying on the coast. This little blog post led to a
feature interview with a scientist about the topic, and people came back to read it.

Alpert also holds contests to illustrate a particular issue around education in the city; recently, she asked readers to submit the best, and worst, classroom worksheets in the school district.

*Problem: A paper like the Chicago Tribune is trying to cover the whole world, but no one is covering everything in Chicago.

Solution: "If we can't do it better than anyone else, we won't cover it," Alpert says of Voice, which has a handful of staff members, but no pressure to be every paper for everybody in the city. Rather than cove the same story everyone else is doing, try to add value to the cache of stories on a topic. She keeps a rolodex of people she's met, with notes like "parent who was angry about such and such."