Ahead of the Curve

IDK if this is a brilliant move to get people engaged in newspapers again or another step closer to the end, but the New York Times has announced a project called The Local East Village. The goal is to cover the blocks that make up the Village by allowing any registered user of nytimes.com to suggest a story idea or cover a story through a Virtual Assignment Desk.

Courtesy its Web site:
"The Local is a journalistic collaboration designed to reflect the richness of the East Village, report on its issues and concerns, give voice to its people and create a space for our neighbors to tell stories about themselves. It is operated by the students and faculty of the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute at New York University, in collaboration with The New York Times, which provides supervision to ensure that the blog remains impartial, reporting-based, thorough and rooted in Times standards."

I do appreciate that it's not a community blog or free-for-all and will have to abide by journalistic standards. And I think it will be a fabulous way to get people logging on to read content. Perhaps it will be a model for other papers to follow, a way for the public to show editors what matters to readers and the people we want to be readers.
It will certainly allow readers to buy into an idea that the NY times is now "their paper," and will allow a sense of representation for a very unique community. But for journalists who make a living by writing, it might seem imposing that now any one with a computer will be able to get published in connection with one of the most respected papers in America.