The future of Carson Now
I want to take a break from the news to talk a little inside baseball about Carson Now and what's happening here.
On Monday I was notified that I had been selected for a John S. Knight Journalism Fellowship at Stanford University for the 2012-13 school year. It's an amazing opportunity to further the work I have done with Carson Now, at the top school in the world for Internet innovation. Situated in Silicon Valley, it's where Google, Yahoo! and more than 5,000 other companies were born.
I will also be working with some fantastic people. When I look over the list of my fellow Fellows, I'm in awe to be included in this group of highly experienced journalists who work at some of the top news organizations in the country. There were 13 U.S. Fellows selected, along with eight international fellows, out of a total of 368 who applied.
Besides taking a few classes, I'll be working on the innovation project that I submitted with my application, which deals with creating a promotion and marketing system to serve the needs of local businesses, which in turn will sustain and grow local media organizations. As I presented it to the Knight program, the biggest challenge facing local journalism is finding a way to pay for it.
The print news audience is dying, and newspapers haven't found a way to make online news profitable enough to support their old infrastructure. That has led some publications like the Nevada Appeal to make rather shortsighted decisions to lock away their content behind paywalls, hoping to protect the last vestiges of the print edition.
At the end of my year at Stanford, I hope to have a working system that any local news outlet can use to carve out a brighter financial future for themselves. I'll even offer it to my former employer/present-day competitor, though I doubt they would accept the help seeing how far down the paywall road they have traveled so far.
During my year away, I will be turning over Carson Now to a new team to handle the stories and advertising. My fellowship doesn't begin until September, so I have some time to recruit some good people. Anyone who is interested can contact me.
I will still be involved with Carson Now, as it will be the test site for my project, and I plan to be back in Carson City periodically throughout the year. The site will be seeing some attention and scrutiny from the journalism world as they look in on what we are doing, which can only serve to make it better.
In the meantime, it will be business as usual. We will keep trying to bring you all the news about Carson City, and we appreciate all the tips and submissions sent in by readers.
Thanks for your support.
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