Category: Online news

Many of the problems we face in community journalism are the same ones our predecessors had to cope with. Reluctant sources, personnel problems, slow ad sales, competition, ethical dilemmas – the problems look different in 2012, but they’re essentially the same old issues re-framed for today’s media world.

But we do have one unique issue for 2012: Will the next generation of readers read newspapers, or will they even seek out news as we define it, at all?

So spend a few minutes with these two online articles. They’re talking about young people and where they get – or don’t get – news. And though they take different approaches, they agree that tomorrow’s readers will not approach news the same way our generation has. I remember our saying, a couple of decades ago, that young people may not read newspapers now – but just wait till they get married and have a family and a mortgage. Then they’ll read the paper. And maybe that was true then. No longer.

Young people frequently think, one of these articles points out, that if something is really news, it will find THEM. And the way it’ll find them is through their social networks.

What does all that mean for us? At the Center, we do a lot of thinking about that. And while we are not sure about the answers yet, one thing we do know is that it means that every newspaper needs to develop a dynamic social media presence. Social media are not an afterthought – more than 900 million people worldwide are on Facebook, and to be irrelevant on Facebook is to be irrelevant to the lives of many of those readers. And the same goes for newspapers that see Facebook as just another publication platform rather than an interaction with their audience.

The real question, and the one we’re looking into at the Center, is how to incorporate a social media strategy into the life of every Texas community newspaper. If you can see that your social media strategy is helping you reach new readers and making your newspaper more relevant to your community, we’d like to hear from you. No one has all the answers; we need to look for them together as an industry.

This ain’t your grandaddy’s journalism. And though most of us learned to write using the traditional news and feature approaches, new media have given us many more ways to tell stories. So spend some time with this site — perhaps you will see something you would like to adapt and try at your paper. But even if you don’t, it’s really important that we follow trends, including those bandwagons we’re not ready to jump onto at this point. So look at the future, including stories based in Facebook, data visualization, the aggregation of user-generated content, creative use of slideshows and more. You’ll probably be impressed that these 18 alternative news stories are just old-fashioned good journalism, but packaged for digital delivery.

So let’s assume somebody wants to set up an Internet-only competitor for your newspaper. Something that could deliver the same types of news you do, just online. A competitor for advertising dollars. Someone who would offer the news and photos and videos of your community, and probably at no cost to readers. You know how much it might cost another newspaper to come into town and set up a duplicate version of your operation – but how much would it cost an Internet start-up to come in and do exactly what you do, but do it online? Warren Webster, president of AOL’s Patch, which is doing just that, has a figure: 4.1 percent of what you are spending now, to duplicate everything you’re doing on the Web. Aaaarrrrgh! Check out this article. (And by the way: I talked with an editor at Patch last month, and she said they are already in the initial stages of getting ready to enter the Texas market.)

So you heard someone talking about Ruby on Rails and it sounded like a Merle Haggard ballad — and then you found out it was a Net platform? And you’ve always wanted a plain-English explanation of SEO, CSS and cloud computing? You’re in luck. Poynter has posted a glossary of Internet terms that every digital journalist should know. And even if you don’t “need” to know, imagine how impressed everyone in your office will be when you throw terms like metadata and data visualization into the conversation.

Alan Mutter’s always-interesting blog, Reflections of a Newsosaur, draws some conclusions about Internet start-up news operations that are certainly of interest to Texas newspapers who may someday face competition from online-only media (some already do). The bottom line, Mutter says, is that frequently the startups are run by journalists who are interested primarily in producing a good news product. In other words, the focus is on good journalism rather than building the business model and focusing on how the startup will make enough money to survive. Journalists who start these Internet operations frequently assume that good journalism will make a way for itself. To borrow from the baseball movie, they assume that if you build a quality news medium, the readers will come and so will the advertisers. But they’re so busy with journalism, they neglect the how-am-I-going-to-make-any-money-off-this end.