The monthly Minneapolis neighborhood newspaper The Bridge just published its final printed edition. Covering neighborhoods on either side of the Mississippi River from downtown to the St. Paul border, the paper or its predecessor publications had been in print for 40 years.
The staff gathered here upon the last pile of papers after it was delivered by the printer.
The Bridge is moving to a web-only format at bridgelandnews.org, and encouraging people to sign up on the site for a monthly email newsletter of important stories. DN3 is already signed up.
This is an experiment for a neighborhood news organization, at least locally. Without a physical object, will people read it? Without a "guaranteed" readership base, will anyone advertise? How does hyper-local work in a worldwide medium?
It's quite possible The Bridge can be an even better resource, since it won't be limited by a monthly schedule or the typical space constraints of a small paper. But it needs community support to make the transition and get a chance to deliver online those key elements of good journalism (see my earlier post on this topic):
- beat reporters -- key to localism and citizen action
- investigative reporters -- with budgets that allow them to dig, enough so that if they sometimes come up empty, it's not a disaster
- editors -- not just copy editors (although those are required, too!), but overall editors who have an idea of what to cover, and who give us half a chance of turning information into knowledge
- serendipity -- odd juxtapositions that put stories in front of us that we never thought we'd read
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