Taylor Walsh's Page

(August, 2009)

Here is some context for my interest in the future of news and journalism, given the fact that I haven't practiced in many moons and so cannot claim recent experience coping with the difficult processes coursing through newsrooms and the profession.

Early:
Montgomery Journal, Montgomery County, MD: suburban weekly owned by Army-Times which had a group in the metro Washington region. Lots of sports reporting, writing and editing when the pub launched.
The Paterson News, Paterson, NJ: reporter, columnist, AM edition editor for this northern NJ daily (no Sunday). Owned then by Allbritton Communications. (Hired out a DC bar by Dave Burgin. News publisher at the time, Dean Singleton.)
The Daily Star, Beirut, Lebanon: editor, columnist. English daily, companion of Al Hayat. Arrived 4 weeks before outbreak of the '75 civil war. Stringer for Washington Star (RIP). Managed to hang around for 4 months.

Digital:
Source Telecomputing Corp., McLean, VA. suburban DC. Owned by Reader's Digest (RIP). Produced The Source, with Compuserve the first national online service for pc users who managed to connect modems to the phone line. While Managing Editor there, helped create an industry-first online newsroom, for packaging content from various sources (i.e., UPI) to feed to clients like Cox, ITT's telex unit. While at The Source, I kept an interest in how the medium would affect news and publishing and watched tentative first steps, such as the AP-Compuserve arrangement. Been observing since.

From earliest online digital experience, I've worked with the capability of the medium to enable what we now call social networks, to create spaces where people with common interests, tasks, needs, etc. can gather in a useful way. Since early 1990's I've spent a lot of time on applications in local communities; I was involved in the formation of and was the ED of a regional public ISP called CapAccess in Washington that ultimately was absorbed by WETA. All UGC in the form of email lists and forums, bringing civic agencies and local govs pre-browser "sites" prior to the arrival of HTTP.

That has all led to formulation of local models for news that are underpinned by what I see as the unique attributes of the digital medium. I've posted a slideshow here on RJI Collab that describes a model to apply social networking to a local web media enterprise that will finance local journalism. I've been working a variation on the theme in health care over the last 18 months.