The sad aspect of downsized newsrooms means that news quality and breadth of coverage suffers. Along with this, as traditional news grapples with how to handle the social aspect of online media, the distortions of information occur to rampant degrees. Anonymous commenting appears to have become the sustaining mechanism of online advertising for many news sites, commenting which offers only increases clicks, not more constructive dialogue.

Along with this, partisan news outlets have gained in popularity in the past 15 years, which has only increased misinformation and ire among an otherwise civil populace. This video, albeit selectively edited and slanted in its own right, is a painful consequence of such domineering partisanship. Make no mistake: A left-oriented rally could easily yield a similar production.

One solution some of us in Reno have offered up is to create a news portal that is uninhibited in what it allows to be posted in terms of newsworthiness. As communications professionals and bloggers with political, and other, slants of our own, we saw a need for quality information regardless of where it originates and that is unfiltered by gatekeepers.

Simply, we maintain the odd notion that organizations do a fine job of telling their own stories. Where we falter is that we store this information on our sites and send it to the news media as a means to communicate to a broader audience. What happens is that this information gets distilled, transformed and even completely misrepresented by news gatekeepers.

If incorrect or distorted by the news media, the best we can do is put our version of the news on our own Web sites and hope that another media outlet covers the information more fairly and accurately. In other words, we consent, oddly, to the unstated decree that we are somehow lesser qualified to tell our stories simply because we don’t have the same reach the more mainstream traditional news does.

This is changing. Social media has upturned the dynamic of how news is broken and given to us more of an ability to communicate directly with those we want to reach.

Locally, one way we have done this is to develop an online ‘news’ outlet called This Is Reno, which centralizes the news from other organizations that we can also contribute to free of the often uninformed or agenda-setting gatekeeper filtration.

A headline that misconstrues what the article actually says. Posted on the Reno Gazette-Journal Web site on September 16, 2009.

Here is why this is important. If you visit this news release posted two days ago, which is only slightly edited (the extensive list of names wasn’t included), and then the one that made the news, you’ll note the gatekeeper version has a title that is incorrect, and could have even been rewritten to make the effort sound slightly dumber and inconsequential. This is the nature of journalism and what we as PR pros have come to expect, and, sadly, live with.

The reality is that organizations have always been able to adequately speak for themselves. With a collectively run news site, we can let readers be the ones to determine whether or not our news is important. By allowing readers to comment – we don’t allow anonymous attacks on the site – and by posting the most popular posts in order, audiences determine newsworthiness. And they have the opportunity to tell us if they think we’re full of shit. (We also don’t accept advertising of any sort. The banner ads to date have been voluntary and they link back to community events put on by non-profit organizations.)

While creating your own community news site is a noted departure from what has traditionally been considered news, it is really not too much different from what PR pros do in their day jobs. The only difference is that we are collectively posting news from our colleagues rather than just on our own Web sites.

The results have been surprising. In just over a month of launching, the site’s stats remain consistently growing, we have nearly 300 fans on Facebook and more and more news is being fed to us each day. This is all by word of mouth. Anecdotal comments have been mostly positive, and the public relations folks who send us their news basically think it’s a great idea.

I encourage public relations professionals to do something similar within their own communities. With a site such as This Is Reno, you and your colleagues can envision the news and opinion in a new way, one that can be sustained and archived according to your liking.