Comments on: Local as an operating principle http://joemichaud.com/2009/03/20/local-as-an-operating-principle/ Local Interactive Strategies Sun, 12 Feb 2012 00:54:44 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.com/ By: joemichaud http://joemichaud.com/2009/03/20/local-as-an-operating-principle/#comment-173 Thu, 11 Jun 2009 12:07:46 +0000 http://joemichaud.com/?p=110#comment-173 Mike, thanks for the thoughtful comments. I think you’re right that a lot of what’s affecting newspapers is social dynamics, and somehow journalists need to adapt to these changes.

Sorry, I’m not that Joe Michaud, but I’m glad the coincidence led you to comment.

]]> By: Mike Greenberg http://joemichaud.com/2009/03/20/local-as-an-operating-principle/#comment-172 Thu, 11 Jun 2009 05:44:45 +0000 http://joemichaud.com/?p=110#comment-172 I’ve been doing local journalism my entire professional life, first at Chicago Magazine, then briefly at D Magazine in Dallas, and then for 28 years as a critic and columnist at the San Antonio Express-News in my home town. Writing about local neighborhoods, urban design, architecture and general culture, I built a loyal readership among people who were engaged with their community. A lot of other journalists at my newspaper, and the newspaper itself, did, too. But it’s my impression (and, I think, Putnam’s) that the ranks of such community-engaged people have not been growing apace with the metro population, in San Antonio and in most rapidly growing metros, especially in the Sun Belt. The problem as I see it is not a decline of localism, but the relative decline of localities. That newspaper readership peaked in the late 1940s, together with Putnam’s observation that civic engagement peaked in the mid-1960s, is suggestive. Although I won’t blame suburbanization in itself, I think it is clear that the particular type of auto-dominant suburban development that began to emerge after World War II inhibited the knitting together of individual homes, businesses and institutions into neighborhoods, and of neighborhoods into cities. The kinds of relationships that Jane Jabobs described in the diverse, complex, functionally mixed environment of Greenwich Village (and that could also be seen to lesser but significant degree in pre-World War II suburbs) were not possible in the new suburbia of strictly segregated land uses, economically homogeneous residential pods and the difficulty of going anywhere at all without an automobile. The gated subdivisions that emerged in the 1970s exacerbated the problem. Most of the residents of the San Antonio metro now live in subdivisions that are have only a tenuous physical/geographic connection to adjoining subdivisions and the nearest strip mall — much less to the city as a whole and to its historic core. Certainly many suburbanites do manage to participate in the life of the larger city, but such participation is much more difficult and infrequent now than it was when the larger city was close at hand. Not incidentally, the same geographical characteristics that inhibit the sense of community in the post-World War II suburbs have also increased the cost of delivering a physical newspaper. (Trucks have to drive farther to pass the same number of subscribers.)

But the real reason I came to this site was to ask if you’re the same Joe Michaud who was in my Outward Bound group in 1969.

]]> By: Howard Owens http://joemichaud.com/2009/03/20/local-as-an-operating-principle/#comment-136 Thu, 09 Apr 2009 01:30:33 +0000 http://joemichaud.com/?p=110#comment-136 That’s very nice, Joe, thank you.

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