Wednesday, November 25, 2009
Media / News Bites Will Any of These Ideas Save Your Newspaper?
Posted by Michael Miner on 11.25.09 at 11:58 AM
Last April Dennis Robaugh was talking to me about innovation in the newspaper industry, the need for which was italicized by the reason I'd called him — he'd just been laid off as managing editor of the Southtown Star.
What's going on out there that's interesting? I'd wondered. Robaugh emailed me today with an answer. It's a blog post by social media strategist Woody Lewis, "10 Ways Newspapers Are Using Social Media to Save the Industry." Lewis wrote it several months ago, but it was new to Robaugh and I hadn't seen it either.
If there's anything in Lewis's survey that makes you feel a little more hopeful, happy Thanksgiving.
Comments (1)
Showing 1-1 of 1
Item No. 5, story-based online communities, looks kinda promising as a way to supplement the paper product, which is the one that actually makes enough money to support large staffs of full-time journalists and is still far and away the best way to cover news. The other items just point away from print.
But, wow, there certainly are a lot of ideas out there, that's for sure. However, it occurs to me that the sheer proliferation of pipe dreams tends to undermine and diminish each individual idea. There's just way too much stuff. In particular, the general notion of using social media comes at a time when people are getting fed up with the stuff as a wasteful, annoying and privacy-threatening time suck.
That's where newspapers--on actual paper, quietly, unflashily, authoritatively lying on your doorstep--have an enormous advantage, as an island of calm sanity wholly removed from the hideous online time-suck menace. Plus (have I mentioned this?) newspapers are profitable.
By the way, the next issue of McSweeney's quarterly is supposed to be in the form of a big Sunday newspaper, called the Panorama. It may be too much to hope, but I'm counting on this to show us what a great newspaper can be and how we can go about saving the form by applying, perhaps, some genuine talent and imagination. I'm hoping it will at least be a welcome relief from the endless and by-now tedious ruminations about how we can save newspapers by somehow trapping them behind the miserable little computer screens where too many of us (myself included ) mindlessly twiddle away our conscious hours to little or no effect.
Of course, the Panorama may end up looking like the Zell Tribune. In which case I'll very much regret the $16 I've already shelled out for it.
like
dislike
