Journalists everywhere are feeling the pressure and dealing with the rapid changes in the media scape and publishers seem to be at a loss for solutions. The most progress is coming from the journalists themselves rather than the corporately owned newspapers with the resources (although limited) to identify and adapt to new media aggregation.
The thing that seems to be missing from all these dooms-day reports coming from newspapers are solutions. From a corporate perspective, the solutions seem to be limited to layoffs and cutbacks. The most progress many newspapers have made is to launch a website- a far cry from what needs to happen to meet the needs of a changing reader base.
Journalists as Problem Solvers
Ryan Sholin started the network Wired Journalists as a resource for journalists looking to diversify their careers. The goal -- to help journalists who have few resources on hand other than their own desire to make a difference and help journalism grow into its new 21st Century role.
On Ryan's website reporters, editors, executives, students and faculty share their thoughts on everything from newspaper websites to the challenges of getting hired these days. The encouraging thing is that these journalists are eager to address what's happening and find a way to "get wired and get hired."
In an earlier post on PitchEngine, I shared David Cohn's new format for Spot.us, a new community funded reporter project that allows for journalists to pitch stories to the community and then the community pay for the reporters to research and ink the story. It's an out-of-the-box approach, but one that surely demonstrates some validity.
Newspapers as Community Centers
Why have newspapers not embraced a community approach? While national newspapers might be the exception, local and regional newspapers have an excellent opportunity to utilize social media as an avenue for ad revenue.
Living in a small town of 10,000 people, I'm amazed how how disconnected everyone is. Currently, the only real news aggregation happens through word of mouth and the rest, broad strokes in the community newspaper or on the radio station. News resides in silos throughout the community and it needs to be connected.
I believe there's a huge opportunity for newspapers to harness and distribute more news than ever before. Community newspapers could potentially become the source for everything local, and perhaps beyond.
How would it work?
Readers would sign up for your news (much like they do now on newspaper websites). Through the registration process readers would identify their news interests and a few other key demographic elements. Newspapers would then use the growing database of readers to target readers with ad campaigns specific to their interests. If they're travelers, perhaps their page would have travel-related advertising on it, etc. Newspapers could charge a premium for a more targeted ad approach.
Newspaper Becomes the Social News Source
Make the newspaper the source for information in your community. By allowing users (or readers) to contribute to a "social news source" readers will be more apt to share their content with other readers- more of a viral loop. Members of the community would feed the news source with relevant information moderated by editors. For example, a parent or coach could blog and even tweet about the away-game while it's happening to a group of interested readers (like an audience tuned in on the radio). A reporter/photographer could snap and photos and video from the political rally to share with the community.
The community would be divided into groups, each with different news interests. This would open up a heavy flow of content and more a widening community of readers.
Does a social news source eliminate the printed newspaper? I think it could strengthen it. By tracking live up-to-the-second content being fed and clicked on via the website, editors could compile the print edition to reflect the article of interest from the web. Much like the Spot.us example above, journalists could pitch stories to the community straight from the newspaper's website.
Either way, the newspaper game is changing. Unfortunately, it's not changing for the positive at the moment. Much like my approach, there are countless ideas for how newspapers can adapt, survive and maybe even flourish in this new media scape. The first step though is to aggressively challenge tradition. Scary? Yes. Risky? Yes.
What do you think? Will newspaper as we know it survive another new social media savvy generation? And will corporate news organizations take the steps to advance tradition?
Related Post: Journalists as Entrepreneurs
Original post on PitchEngine - The Social Media PR Revolution