The No. 1 thing newspapers have botched in the last 15 years is technology.
They have been slow to adapt, slow to embrace and slow to realize they are making themselves obsolete. Many newspapers continue to act like they exist in the pre-Web days, and journalists opening long for the past.
Why?
The Web will make journalism better, will inform more people and allow people to connect better with their communities. Despite this obvious realization, newspapers have done everything in their power to make themselves irrelevant.
Howard Owens has an interesting piece that I recommend everyone check out: Newspapers major mistakes with the Web
Owens writes about the eight historical mistakes he believes the newspaper industry made. It’s a good read for anyone who wants to understand what went wrong and what can be done to turn things around.
It goes over the major points that newspapers need to accept: a new classified model needs to be built (it has to be free online), user interaction needs to be embraced, a continuous news cycle is key, investment is a must and searchability cannot be overlooked.
If there is one point I disagree with, it’s his first on the importance of blogging. He overstates it. Newspapers need to be careful with blogging.
They need to add blogs that add value and are journalistically sound. He encourages a wide swath of newsroom bloggers, which probably would be a catastrophic mistake.
First, blogs have to be on topic. Often newsroom bloggers blog about random topics and get themselves in trouble by revealing biases.
Blogging is a technology. Bloggers are people. Users connect with good bloggers, not the technology.
Another important point is that blogging doesn’t resonate as well with younger audiences as many people assume. The majority of my readers are older then me. The majority of the big-time bloggers are a bit older than me and my peers.
I conducted a survey of college students in 2006, and my data doesn’t reconcile with Owens’ views. Blogging was not popular with students then, and I doubt it has gained that much traction.
I think blogging, when done right, can add to a journalism site — it can add a lot. But I don’t believe it is a make or break feature.
Owens has a more uplifting piece today about the hopeful future of journalism. He makes a great point that newspapers need to realize:
We know community. I’ve said it many times, community is in our DNA. So when it comes to creating online communities – web 2.0, virtual communities, platforms for participation – we know how to do this. It’s a natural fit for what we’ve always done. We just need to build better tools and a more web-native infrastructure. I believe we’ll get there. Social networks and newspaper organizations are a natural fit. Long term, I have more hope for newspaper networks than Facebook and MySpace. Frankly.
If newspapers just understand that they know communities and that they help define them, they’ll be OK on the Web. They need to embrace that community-building heritage with the best community-building tools on the Web.
The broader point that Owens has made and countless others, including myself, is that newspapers need to embrace technology. That’s what it is all about. There is no holy grail for making the perfect journalism site on the Web.
The secret is simple: embrace technology and give your users what they want. Newspaper for far too long have been in the business of giving users what they want to give them.
Users have spoken.
They want social networks, they want a site where everything is searchable, they want community calendars and ways to connect with other people, they want new media journalism, they want a continuous news cycle. They want a site that fits their needs.
They want a site that is a portal into their lives and the community around them. This is why most hyperlocal sites have failed. They focused too much on community journalism and not enough on social networking or technology.
With great, easy-to-use technology, sites like facebook have become immensely popular. You’ll mind millions of photos on the site, along with countless other content, including peoples’ blogs. But facebook never provided content and was never about that.
It was always about the technology. They built the best and now they have a great community with great content.
If newspapers embrace technology they’ll find themselves relevant again and reaching a much broader audience.
