In our latest newsletter, I posted the story of Terri Bennett, former chief meteorologist at WCNC-TV in Charlotte. Her contract wasn’t renewed (PR speak for “she was fired”) this summer, so Terri has launched a local weather site that competes with her former employer. She rightly feels that “Terri Bennett” is a brand in the Charlotte market, so why not exploit the brand to make a living? The site is primitive, but her plans are not.

And this is happening elsewhere with a frequency that ought to alarm the companies letting these people go. In Minneapolis, MinnPost.com launched this week. It’s a news start-up in the twin cities that’s built and maintained by Joel Kramer, the former publisher of the Star Tribune and former reporters from the newspaper downsizing blood bath earlier this year.

“Between the two papers, I think they’ve cut at least 120 or 130 news jobs in the past year,” Kramer told Minnesota Public Radio. “And I think no matter how hard they try to do the best they can, that’s a big reduction and it shows up all over the place in news, in business, in arts.”

So now these former employees are competing with their former employer as freelancers for a start-up. Do you see a pattern developing here?

There are other examples, and they all represent what Glenn Reynolds called in his book, An Army of Davids “the triumph of personal technology of mass technology.” Despite this new reality, mainstream media companies continue to lay people off instead of exploiting the tools and energy of the personal media revolution to better serve their communities.

In fact, some are finding that it’s beginning to actually eat into their business instead of just being the annoyance that perhaps it was at one time. In Missoula, Montana, a group of students from the University of Montana have created a news website serving the Crow Indian Reservation CrowNews.net. This has not gone over well with Wes Eben, the publisher of the Big Horn County News in nearby Hardin, who says that the Crow Reservation is “not an underserved market.” That means, of course, that his paper does business there and doesn’t appreciate the competition.

So Eben’s paper may have to downsize, because business will go down, and that will put people on the street who could work on the student project.

I hope you’re taking notes, because we’re living in a remarkable time in the history of communications.

This entry was posted on Saturday, November 10th, 2007 at 11:53 am and is filed under Journalism, Disruptions, Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.