Doc Searls, commenting on the newsroom of the Santa Barbara News Press setting up shop online as the Santa Barbara Newsroom:
It’s also odd to see this paper-in-pixels as a Teamsters operation. Yes, I know that what the Teamsters are doing here is a Good Thing. But my hope for the SB Newsroom was to see a new online paper that would carry forward as its own operation, with its own publishing as well as editorial ambitions. What we have here is a new breed that isn’t built to reproduce. Meaning nobody else can use it. It’s unique to Santa Barbara’s bizarre dispute between the owner of a paper and pretty much everyone else — especially its growing diaspora of cast-off employees.
I’m also not sure that the News-Press is a "public trust." It’s a private business, and always has been. Even if the Teamsters succeed in getting these reporters reinstated at the News-Press, I doubt the result will be a better newspaper than they could create fresh on their own. Especially with Wendy McCaw continuing to own the paper.
Seems to me it would make more sense for the reporters to start their own newspaper. Meanwhile, the odd conflations of public trust, private business, unions running exile newsroom websites, etc., are more eddies in the storm of confusion caused by the Internet moving like a tornado through the traditional business of newspapers. The biggest risk is pretending that the old business will remain unchanged.
-jsq