Sunday, February 13, 2005

Ventura County Star Ushers Into the New Journalism and Media



I don't know how I missed this Dan Gillmore piece on the Ventura County Star. In this article Gillmore opines about the new direction Howard Owens, director of new media for the Star, is taking the paper:

Howard Owens is director of new media for the Ventura County Star, a newspaper in southern California. (I'm fond of the paper in part because it used to run my column.) Owens has a personal blog of real substance, and is becoming a champion of the best ideas in grassroots journalism.

In a recent posting to a mailing list, he said the paper's online editor has the new, additional role of promoting citizen journalism in the community. He wrote:

We see blogs, forums, photo blogs and other forms of citizen journalism as a significant part of the online news world. Our readers want to be part of the process of sharing the news and shaping the news.

(To see his posting in full, go to this link, type "Owens" -- without the quotes -- into the Search box, click on Search and then select the item entitled "Citizen Journalism (Owens, Howard) [2005/02/03]" and click on the View Message button.)

His paper's decision is heartening. It's a move by a relatively small daily (90,000 circulation) owned by a medium-sized chain (Scripps Howard) to embrace the future.

I can't wait to see what the result will be.

I can't either and wonder what the larger papers in California like the LA Times and San Diego Union will do to stay competitive?

No comments:

Post a Comment