Social Media, Yes We Can. If Papers Don’t Do It, Everybody Can.
May 10th, 2008 | by Brad King |
Image by myuibe via Flickr
I’ve been asked to speak at several events in the last year, discussing how technology is reshaping the media landscape.
One recurring meme in my talks is this: social media has changed the expectations of many people in terms of media, and if news organizations don’t adopt those principles they will quickly be left behind by those who better get the landscape.
This is usually met with either guffaws or blank stares. I’m not sure the editors, publishers, reporters and advertisers grasped that I wasn’t just a crank spouting off opinions. We can look at the research from Pew or the traffic numbers from ComScore or the financials from the SEC to track what companies are doing well in the new media economy.
It ain’t traditional news organizations.
Forget those numbers, though. The best illustration of that meme — that journalism will be left behind unless it embraces these tools — may have come in the form of The Orting News, an online-only newspaper started by an advertising agency and run entirely by citizens.
Yup. Journalism as run by an ad agency. No editors. No reporters. None of the precious infrastructure journalists believe tantamount to running an organization (namely themselves).
I get the irony, of course, that I found The Orting News thanks to this story in a traditional outlet (although in all fairness to me, I found it online through a social network called Wired Journalists).
The group uses software called Topix, which aggregates news in one place. Think of it as a localized RSS Reader, pulling information from various sources — television sites, newspapers, weeklies — and allows others to publish information along side those news stories.
Is it a perfect solution? Absolutely not; however, if people are able to launch their own sites — and if these sites (like The Modern Journalist social network, which is powered by NING) offer people better tools to connect and talk with each other, that should frighten news outlets.
At the very least, it should cause them to take a moment and ask why people would migrate there (not that it’s been a mass exodus from traditional sources, at least in terms of the conversation).
