In June, 2009, Gannett launched a group of hyper-local news sites collectively known as InJersey.com. The role of each site was to report the local news from New Jersey communities. Each InJersey site was staffed by (at least) one Gannett reporter and by volunteer bloggers.

As the number of covered communities grew, Gannett reporters assigned to individual sites sometimes had reporting/editing duties on more than one site. They did not live in the towns they were covering and their work loads increased.

While some sites got fairly respectable page hits (Freehold, New Jersey averaged about 65,000 page views a month) some of the others scored only a couple of thousand. This made it very difficult to generate advertising revenue.

Blogger participation fell off and Gannett staffers focused more on their print assignments. Pressed for time, they simply reposted their dead tree stories to the web sites. Finally it was time to turn out the lights…the party was over.

TucsonCitizen.com came on line at about the same time and with the same goal of local news coverage provided by bloggers. Some of our bloggers have trained journalism backgrounds and experience; those who don’t— my judgement call here—make a commendable  effort in the direction of fact checking and journalistic ethics.

But we’re bloggers, and we’re volunteers, which means that we write only about what interests us, and only when the spirit moves us. Some of us discover that writing well, and regularly, is harder than we thought. Readers lose sight of some less regular writers, even though the subject matter of their posts is of real interest. They tend to be pushed aside, as we fight for the equivalent of  above the fold presence for our stories on our home page  This tends to skew the balance of TucsonCitizen.com, which would profit from greater editorial control.

But when all is said and done, I think our local coverage is pretty darn good.

I really urge everyone to read this story about the demise of InJersey.

Rather than take up comment space on Hugh Holub’s excellent post, I’m going to offer my two cents here.

First, an observation about anonymity. Here I agree with Brodesky; it’s a curse. It is especially objectionable in comment threads, where people are able to get away with comments that they would be ashamed of if properly identified.

For all of the supposed anonymous blogging that Brodesky complains of he seems to know quite a bit about who’s blogging where. Here at TC.com most of our bloggers actually sign their blogs and the identity of those who don’t is pretty much an open secret.

One of Brodesky’s major criticisms of the blogosphere is that bloggers don’t do what responsible reporters do: get both sides of the story. Getting “both sides of the story” is what makes real reporters reliable and unbiased.

Maybe so, but it frequently leads to a failed obligation to get at the truth.

Here’s an example:

Too much political reportage takes the form of reporting candidate Jones’s assertion that Social Security is broke and candidate Smith’s claim that Social Security is funded until  the end of time. Is this enough? No. If this is your story you have failed the reader. You haven’t made any attempt to determine which one is right; or if the debate is grounded in contradictory assumptions such that the candidate exchange is simply empty.

Your story my be ‘unbiased’ but it’s less than useful. You have simply reported two opposed biases: Mr. Jones’s truthiness and Mr. Smith’s truthiness. Wow.

Art Jacobson

The new Starnet site popped up on time. A quick appraisal: It is tremendously improved. There is lots of open space and although headlines are in blue the overall feel of the site is clean and white.

Two quibbles: The weather forecast default seems to be Bloomington, Illinois. You have to enter Tucson in the search option. I imagine this will be corrected.

Much more irritating to Star regulars will be the fact that the comments mode doesn’t seem to be working.

Headlines are still in blue, but the whole look of the site is clean and open. I hope we can have something like that here at TC.com.

One improvement would be to rid ourselves of the “blog” look and appear on the site simply as “columnists” or “contributors.”

Here’s an online paper where that seems to work: AnnArbor.com.