John Burke has a thought-provoking post at Editor’s Weblog about the opportunities newspapers are missing by not paying attention to what’s happening in the social networking world. Here’s part of it:
The article says that about 350,000 bands have already posted their material on MySpace [an online community], 3,000 of those coming from the San Francisco Bay Area alone. That’s a potential 3,000 opportunities that the Chronicle has missed.
~snip~
Newspapers, on the other hand, own the power of local. By creating pages for these bands to post their songs and musings they will also create a portal for local buzz that ultimately will attract new readers. And who listens to new local music and attends local concerts? Yep, that prized 18-34 demographic that statistics show newspapers are rapidly losing.
Various media companies are nibbling away at the edges of journalism and social networking, including the attempts of mainstream TV stations (such as KRON in San Francisco) and newspapers (such as the Greensboro News-Record) to meld their journalism with the local blogosphere. We’ve also seen media companies pouring money into some of the social network sites (such as News Corps. investment in the parent company of MySpace).
This is an area that bears watching, particularly at the local level.
UPDATE: I was going to deal with this in a separate post, but it seems to me that there’s a connection between the type of thing John wrote about, and the woes facing alternative weekly newspapers in the U.S. Ted Rall wrote about that in a recent issue of the Boise Weekly, focusing on the impact craigslist is having on the papers.
Before Craigslist, weeklies were killing dailies. Noting that adult readership of daily newspapers dropped from 78 percent in 1950 to 65 percent in 1995, Jeff vonKaenel, owner of the Sacramento News & Review and other weeklies, predicted the end of dailies by 2007: “Within the next 10 years [he wrote in 1997], most local daily newspapers across the nation will be out of existence. Or they will be losing so much money, they will wish they were out of business.” Even after 9/11 prolonged the recession, vonKaenel’s forecast still looked realizable. The average weekly was taking in roughly a third as much advertising revenue as the average daily in 2002, but with less than a tenth of the staff or overhead. Meanwhile, weeklies were trending up-in total number, ad listings, page count and respectability. Panicked dailies, trending the opposite direction with fewer, older readers, launched so-called “faux weeklies”-corporate-owned tabloids designed to appeal to the weeklies’ Gen X and Y demographic.
The Craigslist phenomenon has changed all that. Dailies and weeklies are facing similar drops in ad revenue, but, unlike so many dailies, few weeklies are owned by deep-pocketed corporate parents capable of weathering sustained losses. And alternative weeklies are given away free, so they can’t fall back on subscription revenues. In my hometown, NY Press has become a study in page-count entropy. “Is that thing still in business?” is a standard comment when the ever-skinnier weekly comes up in conversation. The Greenville, South Carolina MetroBeat, Las Vegas Mercury and Spokane, Washington Local Planet have all ceased publication during the last year.
Rall points out that newspapers do important work.
They publish music reviews, edgy cartoons (I got my start in one) and cultural coverage that matter to young adults-and get ignored by the dailies. They pride themselves on their scrappy coverage of local news and politics.
Parts of that list are awfully like a lot of what’s happening the social networking space on the web. If major news media companies (who have much deeper pockets than most of the struggling weeklies) can learn from the social networking sites by following some of John’s ideas, they have a chance of replacing the alternative weeklies and relegating most of them to dusty corners of media history.
TAGS: JOURNALISM, ONLINE MEDIA, SOCIAL NETWORKS
