Nearly everybody reads the Bulletin.
That was the advertising slogan of the late, lamented Philadelphia Bulletin. I mean the Bulletin Sandy Grady wrote for, not the Bulletin in its most recent incarnation.
Number me among the ranks of “everybody.” I delivered it, and when I got home I read it all, beginning to end.
Well, the Bulletin (that Bulletin) is long gone. P.M. newspapers are gone, or mostly. Morning newspapers are biting the dust. Those that remain are struggling. (As witness the recent epic battle over the Inquirer and Daily News.)
Some say that small local Web sites like ours are part of the problem. We do what we do (most of us) for free. We have no employees. We have no paper boys or delivery trucks. There are no presses. No paper or ink. Doing what we do costs us almost nothing. And today it might be fair to say: Nearly everybody reads (whatever they read) online.
On the other hand, many of us have no idea what we’re doing. 🙂 A lot of community sites are published by people with no journalistic training, and no understanding of professional journalistic standards. (We’re both Temple J-school grads, and we’ve worked in newspapers, magazines, books and the Web since the days of Ben Franklin. OK, maybe not that long. But long enough to remember editing stories with a pencil.)
Now the people at The Reynolds Journalism Institute at the Missouri School of Journalism want to know: What does irishphiladelphia.com mean to you? Do you like us? Do you trust us? Do we help build the community?
They asked us to post a survey, and of course we said “you betcha.”
Here’s the survey. It’ll take you less than 10 minutes:
