KETC's Partner in seeking to activate the help of community in the Mortgage Crisis in St Louis is a new online "Newspaper" - The Beacon.
St Louis' main Newspaper, the Dispatch, has been going down the road of many once great local Newspapers in America. Many of the more talented journalists have left and many of these, committed to serving the City they love and committed to remaining journalists, have formed a new online "newspaper" The Beacon.
If this was not itself "Interesting" - The Beacon and Channel 9, KETC and also working together to discover how an online newspaper and a Public TV Station can offer jointly something not yet seen - a digital partnership that will help each fill in the gaps that both have. KETC has no news room, the Beacon has only a limited video capabilty. Of course text, photos, video and sound are all digital.
With no presses to run and no distribution costs, the Beacon is a pure news play with none of the core embedded costs that are eroding the content aspects of most traditional papers. With a video partner with great outreach and with a grwoing social web experience, the hill to climb to find community and the full range of digital answers is less steep.
To make our partnership more real - both the Beacon and KETC also share the same offices - so as well as anything we might plan - serendipity will play a role.
We will discover together how such a partnership will work out. I doubt that this will be the only such experiment.
