This is more in line with getting my own thinking into some sort of order, than it is prescribing for something as vast and diverse as the newspaper industry. There’s nothing groundbreaking here. In fact, some might sound like the new Conventional Wisdom.
At this point in the evolution of newspapers, as part of their inevitable move to online, it seems to me these are the areas where newspapers should be active.
Distributed reporting: Newspapers report news; readers experience it. City council sets a tax rate and newspapers report; every homeowner gets a tax bill. Establishing means of gathering and presenting all that information puts newspapers in touch with a huge reporting resource and pool of stories. Putting readers to “work” as questioners of officials, and giving them a place to publish the responses, short circuits the journalist-politician dance.
Capturing the news: Newspapers don’t own/define news any more. The news is what comes out of the newsroom, but it is also what’s in local blogs (hyperlocal, local, regional, etc.), in the interconnections with the larger world, at news aggregators (local/international), at Flickr and YouTube. Get it all onto your site (RSS feeds etc.), even if it links out. It’s not about being a portal, it’s about being the starting point. Starting points (like Google) are sticky.
New story forms: That’s what video, audio, slideshows are: stories. So can blogs be. And wikis. And databases. It isn’t about trends (you can’t be YouTube), it’s about using increasingly easy technology tools (hard- and software) in service of the storytelling. None of it is any harder to learn than journalism was/is.
New voices (internal/external): We need information quickly and accurately, but we need people speaking to us. Newspapers have previously recognized this with the chosen few (the columnists). Blogging, audio, video open the “voice space” up not just to the commentators, but to the reporters, the photographers, the readers. Giving time and space to those who have something to say deepens the experience of news. The old columnist must provide 700 words once, twice or three times a week; the new voices (from inside and outside the newsroom) can contribute whenever they have something to say add/explain. And stay quiet when they don’t.
Conversation: Comments aren’t necessarily about the newspaper (although they can be), they’re about readers. It’s user-generated content. More, it’s reader material. It can expand the reporting, but that’s not the point: letting them in builds connection between newspaper and reader, reader and reader. The comments are out there in the blogs, too. Find them (Technorati, for a start) and bring them in. The conversation can be baked into the story.
Note: While all of the above only exist in an arena made possible by the existence of the ‘net, that doesn’t mean they can’t also feed the print beast.
Capturing community: I suspect it’s getting late (too late?) and only niches are left. Meetup.com and the like have built communities. Craigslist has rolled them out. Facebook and Myspace, too. New stories, new voices, new conversation create communities of interest, so there’s a niche, although bits and pieces of it (politics, particularly) are already staked out. If community counts for newspapers, the way in is to provide the tools and get out of the way.
A word about local: Consider the case of the phone directory, that most local of publications. In a handful of years it has become irrelevant to a significant portion of telephone users/owners, supplanted by search, by Google maps, by 411. There’s a message there.
The debate is about whether the newspaper needs to “own local” and be prepared to fight for it against the Googles of the world. I need to think more about that, because what seems to be obvious — survival is pinned to the local — also seems a little too pat.
For the moment, that’s it. As I wrote, none of this is earth-shattering. There’s a chance some of it is just plain wrong, and that some of the ideas I have at this moment will change in the next. The world’s a messy place, and journalism, right now, seems particularly messy.
Getting my own thoughts in order helps, though, if only in that it gives me a snapshot of this moment’s understanding of this new mediascape and what it might mean.
