Tim Porter’s post Big News, Big Coverage, Big Opportunity raises the issue of how newspapers are failing to combine the strength of their journalism with the immediacy of the web to give readers information they truly need.
After analyzing the print and web performance of some northern California newspapers in covering extensive flooding there, he writes:
I don’t get it. Readership of online newspaper sites is growing, the opposite of what’s happening to the print product. Yet, even a news-oriented newspaper like the Chronicle fails to take full advantage of the attention provided by this expanding audience during a story that naturally sends more readers to the web.
It should be clear by now to newspapers that their longstanding mix of news, information and advertising is increasingly and irreversibly being unbundled. Peter Rip, a venture cap guy, uses the apt analogy of the newspaper as a mainframe computer and the Internet as the enabler of disruptive businesses (Craigslist, eBay, blogs) that are the new PCs. As these more cost-effective businesses take away the newspaper’s advertising content, all it will have left is its journalism. At that it must excel.
The one comment the post has attracted suggests the reason why the newspapers weren’t getting the information onto the internet more quickly is a lack of resources, with reporters locked into serving the print cycle and a too-small web staff.
It goes deeper than that, I think, in that the thinking is about the product (the newspaper) and not the process (doing journalism that informs people). Getting over that seems to be one of the biggest hurdles for most newspapers.
Which is too bad. In almost every city, the number of reporters and photographers the newspaper can throw at the big local stories is vastly larger than what TV and radio can do. Combine that reporting power with the immediacy of the web, instead of pointing it all at the 8 p.m. deadline, and newspapers can emerge as the go-to source for those big local stories.
TAGS: JOURNALISM, NEWSPAPERS
