The Wired City
Reimagining Journalism and Civic Life in the Post-Newspaper Age
By Dan Kennedy
University of Massachusetts Press
In The Wired City, Dan Kennedy tells the story of the New Haven Independent, a nonprofit community website in Connecticut that is at the leading edge of reinventing local journalism. Through close attention to city government, schools, and neighborhoods, and through an ongoing conversation with its readers, the Independent's small staff of journalists has created a promising model of how to provide members of the public with the information they need in a self-governing society.
Although the Independent is the principal subject of The Wired City, Kennedy examines a number of other online news projects as well, including nonprofit organizations such as Voiceof San Diego and the Connecticut Mirror and for-profit ventures such as the Batavian, Baristanet, and CT News Junkie. Where legacy media such as major city newspapers are cutting back on coverage, entrepreneurs are now moving in to fill at least some of the vacuum.
The Wired City includes the perspectives of journalists, activists, and civic leaders who are actively re-envisioning how journalism can be meaningful in a hyperconnected age of abundant news sources. Kennedy provides deeper context by analyzing the decline of the newspaper industry in recent years and, in the case of those sites choosing such a path, the uneasy relationship between nonprofit status and the First Amendment.
At a time of pessimism over the future of journalism, The Wired City offers hope. What Kennedy documents is not the death of journalism but rather the uncertain and sometimes painful early stages of rebirth.
Although the Independent is the principal subject of The Wired City, Kennedy examines a number of other online news projects as well, including nonprofit organizations such as Voiceof San Diego and the Connecticut Mirror and for-profit ventures such as the Batavian, Baristanet, and CT News Junkie. Where legacy media such as major city newspapers are cutting back on coverage, entrepreneurs are now moving in to fill at least some of the vacuum.
The Wired City includes the perspectives of journalists, activists, and civic leaders who are actively re-envisioning how journalism can be meaningful in a hyperconnected age of abundant news sources. Kennedy provides deeper context by analyzing the decline of the newspaper industry in recent years and, in the case of those sites choosing such a path, the uneasy relationship between nonprofit status and the First Amendment.
At a time of pessimism over the future of journalism, The Wired City offers hope. What Kennedy documents is not the death of journalism but rather the uncertain and sometimes painful early stages of rebirth.
This is the first effort that I'm aware of anywhere to do a book-length profile of an emerging genre—the local online news community. . . . Kennedy does a wonderful job of illustrating this story through people, incidents, anecdotes, and then rolling back into the theory and policy implications. The Wired City is important to participatory democracy and community.'—Bill Densmore, director, The Media Giraffe Project
'This book is for anyone who cares about the future of timely, useful community information, and how it helps citizens fulfill their most essential role: participation.'—Dan Gillmor, author of Mediactive and We the Media: Grassroots Journalism by the People, for the People
'A thoughtful and nuanced book, The Wired City is a standout in chronicling one of the best stories I've read lately of journalists 'comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable.''—Callie Crossley, WGBH radio and TV host, and producer of the documentary series Eyes on the Prize
'Kennedy's book is unlike any you will read on the business model crisis in journalism. For leverage he goes to one place where lower cost, born-on-the-net, nonprofit public service journalism is working: the New Haven Independent. In digging into that case, The Wired City frames the big picture beautifully: Journalism as a practice will go on. But it takes will.'— Jay Rosen, blogger at PressThink and author of What Are Journalists For?
'When we as a democratic society are at what Kennedy accurately calls 'a historical moment when nonprofit media—supported by foundations, donations, and, indirectly, taxpayers, since contributions are tax-deductible—are in many cases more stable than for-profit media,' his book offers a valuable window into one possible future. . . . Researching his book, Kennedy concludes, 'left me profoundly optimistic about the future of journalism.' Reading it will do the same for you.'—The Huffington Post
'An efficient primer on the new age of journalism . . . Kennedy shrewdly identifies how a late-20th-century notion (public journalism, which listened more than preached) morphed into an early-21st-century phenomenon (the remarkable growth of online readership) to produce an alternative to an early-20th-century idea (the mass circulation newspaper).'—The Boston Globe
'Dan Kennedy's The Wired City is a modest but informative and at times inspiring book about admirable attempts, on a local level, to combat a pestilence that is crippling the well-being of professional journalism.'—The Arts Fuse
'The Wired City transcends the exhausting debate over what journalism startups should look like. It gets at a more fundamental point: that news startups, both for-profit and nonprofit, matter.'—Columbia Journalism Review
'The book is a quick read for anyone interested in the future of local news. Recommended.'—Choice
'The Wired City is accessible and conversational. Kennedy adopts a breezy, personal tone. He writes poignantly of the financial crisis and staff cutbacks in the newspaper industry.'—Journalism Mass Communication Quarterly
Dan Kennedy is assistant professor of journalism at Northeastern University and has been a working journalist for nearly forty years. He currently contributes to the Huffington Post and the Nieman Journalism Lab. You can follow his Media Nation blog at http://dankennedy.net.Please see his interview on WBGH Greater Boston here http://www.wgbhnews.org/post/dan-kennedy-reimagines-journalism-wired-city
