The fact that Jean Dubail is sporting a Superman T-shirt when he opens the front door is sort of appropriate. Like Clark Kent, Dubail was a mild-mannered reporter for a great metropolitan newspaper, in a previous identity, but late last year he left the city room of the Plain Dealer to become a regional editor for a new journalistic venture in Northeast Ohio. It's a web-based news service called Patch --- a string of community newspapers… without the paper.
JEAN DUBAIL: We're totally online, there's no printing plant, no fleet of delivery trucks, no infrastructure whatsoever. So, with my laptop, my wireless card and my iPhone and a camera that Patch issues me, I'm a journalist that's pretty much living off the land.
Dubail and another former Plain Dealer staffer, Susan Patton, ride herd over 17 Patch bureaus, scattered across the region.
SUSAN PATTON: We have an editor who is in charge of the site, and that editor focuses on that community. They're working out of their homes, out of the coffee shops, some of the local editors will write their stories while they're in the City Council meeting.
This so-called "hyper-local" community reporting may rarely, if ever, reach the high excitement of hard-knuckle investigative pieces and exposés, but Jean Dubail says Patch fills a gap in news coverage that's grown with the downsizing of newspapers over the past 20 years.
JEAN DUBAIL: And this is true of metropolitan dailies all over the country.
Patch has stepped into the breach thanks to the corporate muscle of America Online, which has spent millions of dollars backing small news bureaus across the country. There were about 30 Patch sites a year ago and now there are over 800. Susan Patton notes that Patch was the number one hirer of journalists in the country, last year.
SUSAN PATTON: These are all trained, experienced journalists. My team ranges from journalists with five years experience to 25-30 years experience in newspapers.
And the Plain Dealer's been feeling the heat. The Northeast Ohio Patch bureaus were launched in December. In January, the PD announced that they were re-tooling their own community web pages.
DAVID KORDALSKI: This was something that we would have done --- with competition or without --- but, competition obviously has accelerated our interest in doing this.
David Kordalski is leading the Plain Dealer's effort to capture the eyeballs of suburban readers. That's meant integrating the weekly Sun newspapers - owned by Plain Dealer Parent Company Advance Publications - into the daily output of the PD and its on-line edition, Cleveland.com.
DAVID KORDALSKI: You'll see that a lot of the Sun posts are made in real time, where before they would have, let's say, covered something on a Friday, and they'd wait till Tuesday to write the story, because it wasn't going to show up in the Sun till next Thursday. Now, when they cover an event, they post it. And I think that makes their coverage stronger.
Another source of material for both Patch and the Plain Dealer community web pages is …the community, itself. Readers are encouraged to submit stories, blog entries, pictures and videos. David Kordalski admits that, sometimes, the quality of the public postings leave something to be desired.
DAVID KORDALSKI: I'm used to a standard that professionals have, and to see things that are, maybe, not quite as well produced, it's a little …painful (laughs).
Stirring a cup of coffee at Lakewood's Root Café, Jim O'Bryan says he doesn't have much time for the "professional standards" of the mainstream media. O'Bryan is a self-proclaimed "evangelist" for community journalism, and five years ago he and some like-minded friends launched the Lakewood Observer, a paper that champions input from non-professionals. O'Bryan freely admits that sometimes the writers can get opinionated.
JIM O'BRYAN: I think people reading our paper, generally understand that aspect of it. It is not a traditional newspaper, we have never claimed that it is.
There are now Observer sister publications in Cleveland Heights, Parma and Cleveland's Collinwood neighborhood, and more in the works. He doesn't think highly of his competition from Patch, which also has a Lakewood outpost.
JIM O'BRYAN: The Wall Street Journal called them "the Wal-Mart of hyper-local journalism". I think that's overselling the project. I'd call them the Builder's Square of hyper-local journalism.
That's a reference to a big box home supply chain that over-built its outlets and fell into bankruptcy. Indeed, Some observers have questioned how long America Online can keep funneling money into its Patch operation. Kent State University's Barb Hipsman is one
BARB HIPSMAN: I don't see a financial model for Patch.
As a journalism prof, Hipsman's job is to prepare aspiring young journalists for the new world of news. Patch has tapped several Kent graduates to be community editors. Given the volatile nature of the news business, Hipsman has warned her former students to be wary.
BARB HIPSMAN: I told each of them, "This is a one year or two year hit. After that, you've got to be creative, because, whether it's going to still be here, I don't know."
Still, she likes the idea of journalists finally getting paid again, after so many layoffs and newspaper shutdowns. And she also likes the new proliferation of grassroots, community reporting - even if it doesn't always play by the traditional rules.
BARB HIPSMAN: I have this real in-my-heart theory that news is democracy. And if you don't have a lot of local news, and national news, and international news, you start to lose democracy --- it starts to shred at the edges.
