Crowdsource the SF Chronicle’s Post Demise Wiki

The SF Chronicle staff has set up a wiki to discuss what to do after the newspaper folds.(h/t Will Sullivan) Although an interesting glimpse at the business minds of journalists at work, I think they need others outside journalism and the print business to suggest ideas.

However, I found these insights to be most interesting:

Technology

No daily paper is going to beat Valleywag, Wired.com, Venture Beat, Mashable, and Techcrunch to scoops in the bay area. It’s just not going to happen. They are too deeply integrated into tech culture.

BUT, a local paper can add value to all the niche scoops that these publications are producing. Curating all the bullshit that comes out of those websites could increase the signal-to-noise ratio by 10 times. Take the HuffPo model and quote freely while linking out to the sites that did the reporting. That’d do it. That’s an enormous amount of value in and of itself. Second, take a look at Sarah Lacy’s recent articles for TechCrunch. She’s got an eye for trends and deep enough contacts in the valley to get the stories written. That’s what you need for a daily paper. In fact, she’d be a perfect editor of a Silicon Valley section of the S.F. Post-Chron.

(I like the idea that journalists see writing as a craft that others can also do well)

On News Aggregation:

One task of the reinvigorated, beefed-up copy desk (noted above) would be to take all the bits of content coming in, from neighborhood bloggers, political reporters, & the community itself, and fit those into wiki entries. So now, editors are a) vetting and improving information, and b) constantly integrating it into the larger context of the wiki.

One early implementation of this idea can be peeped at archExplore. DavisWiki is also a great example. Feel free to add more examples.

Here’s an idea. Our company has been coaching real estate bloggers to post breaking housing market news in their region in the quasi-role of a real estate reporter. Homescopes is an example of a site where Realtors around the Bay Area broadcast/Twitter the latest housing market news in their areas. This kind of unique commentary could also be incorporated into SFGate’s real estate section to supplement the standard new listings ads.

Here’s the request to open up the SF Chronicle post-demise wiki so we can add more examples.