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(Re)Thinking Solutions

November 28, 2005 in Uncategorized

The starting point has to be to rethink content, improve quality and retool delivery to meet consumers’ expectations, which for now means shifting focus to online. Again, the purpose of this virtual conversation is to collect ideas to develop solutions. Here are some starting points gathered from the commercial media world. Please submit data and links you find. More importantly, you’re encouraged to offer your thoughts, suggestions and share the results of your efforts on campus.

Readers of the site are encouraged to submit feedback to any of these articles, or log-in as a guest writer to post to the “continuing the conversation”:http://reinventing.collegemedia.org/index.php?s=conversation section.

Some powerful suggestions for saving newspapers, or at least their core mission, come from veteran journalist and journalism visionary “Tim Porter”:http://www.timporter.com/firstdraft/. Porter offers six ways to rebuild the newspaper system in “Explode the Newsroom”:http://www.timporter.com/firstdraft/archives/000405.html. And finds a spark of hope in “Building the Journalism of the Future, Intentionally”:http://www.timporter.com/firstdraft/archives/000496.html.

A bold readership experiment by the “Readership Institute”:http://www.readership.org/ and The Minneapolis Star-Tribune yielded some positive results by “editing for experience”:http://www.readership.org/resources/reports.htm#experience.

Embracing the concept of “citizen journalism”:http://www.ojr.org/ojr/stories/051108glaser/ and joining forces with “the community”:http://mediacenter.blogs.com/morph/2005/11/hi_im_lex_and_i.html has shown signs of success.

Alan Mutter has more on how partnering with online portals may provide “solutions for newspapers.”:http://newsosaur.blogspot.com/2005/11/playing-nicely-with-others.html

Visit the Digital Think project from API Media Center for a fascinating look at the future of “digital storytelling”:http://www.mediacenter.org/digitalthink/.

From George Washington University, adviser Howard Marshall, [hmarshall@gwhatchet.com] this recently submitted post to the CMA list-serv:

bq. We actually just began experimenting with some ‘e-alternatives.’ We launched a dining and entertainment guide last week, and accordingly, launched the companion “web site”:http://www.gwinsider.com. Secondly, we’ve begun a blog which will allow readers and editorial staff to be more in touch, and to allow transparency in the way the paper is run. Again, it will be it’s own website, but is currently linked from our “main page”:http://www.gwhatchet.com. Lastly, we are about to launch a third website, gwbasketball.com, but haven’t quite finished it. All of this combined with the latest redesign of our main site means that we have expanded our online presence four-fold in just the past two weeks.

As the printed word struggles, the Internet seems to be making up for it. Fortunately, most newspapers caught the digital wave a decade ago. But they have been slow to innovate. “This site”:http://www.editorsweblog.org/news//2005/11/three_reasons_for_newspaper_digital_deve.php shows three reasons why newspapers need to pay more attention to online journalism.

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The Audience Has Changed

November 12, 2005 in hope for the future

Aside from serious tweaking efforts in design, demographic targeting and content refocusing, traditional newspapers today remain relatively unchanged from their predecessors 40 years ago. What has undeniably changed, however, is the audience. Media consumers have entirely new information seeking habits and very different expectations for their information delivery systems. This is especially true for the younger demographic, including those who make up the majority of our college campus populations.

There is evidence that readers are gravitating away from traditional newspapers for a couple of reasons. The first is technology. We live in a high-speed, on-demand world. Often it is the case that consumers will have been alerted to breaking news by television, radio, online, cell phone text messages and other delivery methods long before they will see a report in a printed newspaper. A second cause for the departure of readers is simply the poor quality of content in many newspapers. The rash of recent blunders on the part of the media has added to this decline.

Each year colleges and universities admit a freshman class that includes fewer and fewer habitual print newspaper readers. Without readers, print media is irrelevant. Without readers, advertising and subscription revenue disappears. Without readers, newspapers die. This poses three serious problems for college media:

  • How do we attract these students to our publications and convert them to print readers?
  • How do we recruit students to join the staff of our publications if the experience is perceived to be antiquated?
  • How can we be responsible journalism educators unless our student media operations prepare students for the future of media instead of its past?

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