No Dead Trees Yet for Fairview Fannie/'Hood-Scribe Partnership

The news that the Seattle Times is partnering up with neighborhood blogs and paying them (via a grant from the Knight Foundation) has sent all sorts of ripples through the cash-deprived blogosphere. (It also arrives right on the heels of Times Editorial Page Editor Ryan Blethen's bizarre rant about how bloggers may irreparably damage free-speech protections--as though bloggers can re-write the First Amendment, one post at a time.) One question we had, though: Will we see the work of local bloggers in the print edition of the Times? The answer, for now, is no. Writes West Seattle Blog's Tracy Record:

[W]e're really making it up as we go along, and that's the point of the Knight/J-Lab experiment - what might organizations like ours and theirs discover along the way that would make sense in collaboration, and what might we try that DOESN'T work.

In the meantime, we're not writing/producing anything to be published by the Times, online or offline, and they're not writing/producing anything to be published by us. They are linking to our work if something makes sense for them to link to. We are linking to them in the same way. Nothing reframed, nothing scraped, etc.

I am sure they would need to engage in a variety of discussions before even contemplating suggesting that for example they might put all or part of one of our stories in their print edition - though in extremely rare circumstances, it MIGHT be worth discussing

Similarly, the Times' Bob Payne, who is heading up their end of the project, says that pulling blog partner work for print "has yet to be discussed. Certainly for the early parts of the experiment, the focus will be on online collaboration."

So the Times is on your turf, bloggers. Don't tell Ryan.