Jeremy Wagstaff on the outdated definition of ‘news’:
“We journalists have been schooled in a kind of journalism that goes back to the days when a German called Paul Julius Reuter was delivering it by pigeon. His problem was a simple one: getting new information quickly from A to B. It could be stock prices; it could be the assassination of Abraham Lincoln.”
(via Techdirt.)
Wagstaff’s column goes a long way to explain the wall I’ve been beating my head against here for the last few days: It’s time for newspapers to step up their efforts to send their stories out into the diaspora.
That means full text RSS feeds, active Facebook profiles maintained by real live staffers who drive discussions and answer questions, full-fledged mobile versions of newspaper.coms, Flickr accounts, YouTube channels, podcasts and videoblogs formatted for iTunes, and paying close attention to whatever’s next.
Start setting those carrier pigeons free, put down the flags, and get off the roof. They’ll get there. They’ll be fine.
Provide your readers with somewhere to talk about the news — before someone else does
Topix.net becomes a dot-com, re-aligns to spotlight human editors in geographical and, um, topical communities.
As with Digg or Fark or any other news aggregator that allows readers to comment on the stories (from your newspaper) people post to them, the conversation that belongs with the story on your own site, with your branding at the top of it, is walking away to places like Topix.
Your readers can sign up at Topix to become “editors” of the pages that aggregate news from your town, with the power to post new stories for comment or delete others that are duplicate or off-topic.
Can your community site do that? Why not? Where’s the line between what we’ll allow a reader to edit on a site with a newspaper’s brand on it and what we’ll hire a professional to do?
The lesson? It’s another case of different resources leading to different outcomes. If you have the ability to hire a ‘community editor’ from within your news org, or to hire someone fresh to do it, by all means, hire away. But keep in mind, the stronger a sense of ownership your community members have over the content on their site (it is theirs, right?), the more likely they’ll be to stick around. Which is what you want them to do.