Baristanet vs Montclair Patch vs The Montclair Times: Who's Coverage of the Decamp Strike is Better?

[Michael Schreiber]

Written at about 10am, 9/2/10... so feel free to update this in the comments if the coverage has changed...

These are exciting times to be in the media business in Montclair. It's just like the golden age of newspapers, but on a much smaller scale. Instead of the Herald Tribune vs the NY Times vs The World, it's Baristanet vs Montclair Patch vs The Montclair Times...

The recent Decamp strike seems to be the first true standard measure of the reporting power of the respective news organizations.

Here are my initial thoughts/observations:

Though they did some good early reporting on the subject, the coverage coming from The Montclair Times is sorely lacking overall. It's day one of the strike and they've got nothing on the subject on their homepage. Their sister paper, the Verona-Cedar Grove Times, does have a story up this morn (by my old J-School classmate Noel Pangilinan no less), and that's available through the NorthJersey.com portal (which is the umbrella site for the Montclair Times and other local papers... the portal has three stories on the subject total). But nothing new on the Montclair Times page. Totally embarassing. As the oldest media org, the others should be playing catch up.

Baristanet, with its robust and loyal online following is the horse to beat, and they are rightly leading with this story this morn. That said, their coverage isn't terribly comprehensive. Since the strike began, they've posted one story about the fact that bus riders are taking the train this ..., but that's no shock and there aren't any new insights regarding the status of negotiations, nor are there many particularly useful tips I could find that could actually help commuters. They've done four stories on the strike in total, and they've all been pretty light, if you ask me, though Baristanet does benefit greatly from their relationship with Clever Commute, the community wide commuter email alert system founded by Montclair resident Josh Crandall. They'd be wise to really work that relationship. It's a content goldmine.

I think Montclair Patch's coverage comes out on top, but just barely. Their story this morning is an updated version of yesterday's story, though it is longer, more comprehensive and better sourced than Baristanet's. They also have a prominent link on their homepage to a post from yesterday that rounds up 10 tips for commuters who need to get to work. Very useful. That said, overall their content offerings on the strike are too infrequent, and they haven't done as good a job as Baristanet at keeping the public up do date in the days leading up to the strike. But if we're talking quantity vs quality, for me quality wins.

What do you think?