Kyle
Journatic, a chicago based new media startup that delivers content for some of the major newspapers across the country in a quasi-syndication form, has gone under fire for inking a partnership with the Chicago Tribune. In reading about this all over the internet it seems a bit crazy that they’ve had such blowback from Chicago.
The company produces content for cities all over the country including, Chicago, New York, San Francisco, Miami and other large metropolitan areas.
The Tribune deal has come under fire because the newspaper giant laid off many of it’s local beat reporters in lieu of using the Journatic service. Journatic is actually based in the Chicago Tribune tower so the Tribune didn’t go far for this outsourcing, and unfortunately it’s the way many papers are going, as they lose more and more readership to the internet.
It was widely reported that Journatic’s executive editor Peter Behle offered Journatic staffers a $50 bounty to not engage in conversation about the upcoming lucrative deal with the Tribune and instead talk to a supervisor. They probably didn’t want Tribune reporters asking Journatic reporters about the deal out on smoke breaks in common areas in the Tribune Tower.
More after the break
Journatic’s CEO Brian Timpone said this about the Tribune deal: “We are thrilled that Tribune has chosen to invest in Journatic. We look forward to benefiting from Tribune’s experience in developing successful ventures within the media space.”
Journatic uses a data driven aggregation approach to local news. In the Tribunes Triblocal section it focuses on community calendar events, school lunches and other information that is very easy to source. Now instead of the Tribune having to pay lofty reporter prices for these stories Journatic pays between $2 and $4 for their network of writers to tackle the same stories.
While you would think anyone with an ounce of journalistic integrity would be offended by deals like this it’s been a fact of life in all forms of media. Working nearly 20 years in commercial radio I personally saw more and more of this demoralizing outsourcing but from a business standpoint it’s the kind of decision that has to be made to just keep the Tribune printing in the first place. The radio equivalent to this would be voice tracking. Usually undetectable to the common listener, most radio stations under market 20 employ voice tracks from djs in other cities that take on average an hour to cut a 4 hour show and then play them back remotely. This started in the mid to late 90’s.
“We are a pro-journalism, pro-content, pro-local, pro-original company,” Timpone told chicagoreader.com. “There’s no company like us.” He mentioned algorithms being used in the data collection, but he also mentioned elbow grease. He said Tribune Tower is full of superior journalists “who don’t make it to this point in their careers to go get the honor roll.” But Journatic will get the honor roll and publish it. “It’s a newsgathering job more than it is a reporting job,” he said—the difference in his mind being that reporters talk to people and Journatic endlessly sucks up and massages data. “We’re really good at collecting data,” he said.
Timpone started this data driven approach to news gathering with his first new media endeavor blockshopper.com which provides real estate information to major metropolitan areas. If you’re unclear about Timpone’s position in all this, the banner at the top of the story is from journatic.com
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