Your Morning News...Fresh or Stale?
Sunday, March 28, 2010
Today our news comes from a vast number of directions and alarmingly fast. Journalists and newspapers are constantly challenged with selling what is elsewhere available for free. How we receive our information and news is widely available to everyone and journalists, once again, are struggling to sell the news--at least to people under the age of fifty-five. Editors and news directors feel the angst of the growing and continued population of the Internet. They now see the huge threat the Web represents to the way they distribute their product.
The days of getting your news and information from the newspaper are long gone. More often than not, by the time a story has been printed on the front page of your paper, it has been blasted online for many hours. It is often old news at that point. Many papers and journalists, while slow to this conclusion, have learned that they not only need to report the news but to offer other layers. These layers are often opinions, analysis, points of view, and interpretation. Is it finally time to sell something more than just the news?
In the days when the latest news was available to anyone who chatted in the street or at church or the supermarket provided mostly opinion--the something extra above just the news. The growth of cities and the development of weekly papers encouraged the development of the sale of news and mass production. This has lasted more than a hundred years.
If journalism is to move past just selling widely available, cheap, staler-than your morning coffee news--they must choose to impart of a ear piercing word--wisdom. Mainstream journalists are making a big mistake if they continue to believe that their ability to collect and organize information will continue to make them indispensable.
4 comments:
Good post! This is an interesting theory and very timely. Even the news we read on the Internet sometimes is old and stale. Sometimes a fresh pair of eyes would be a good thing, or looking at something for a different angle. That is another benefit of the internet, being able to access more than one news source so you can get varied points of view.
The industry is also making a huge mistake if they think they can ignore the internet entirely. Journalists need to stop viewing the Web as a threat, and start viewing it as a resource.
One size fits all does not work for news. People want to receive news in the way that works best for them. There are still many people who subscribe to the daily newspaper. Many people now receive their news exclusively from the internet. It is important for news outlets to reach people where they are, be that TV, radio, online, or through a traditional newspaper. Not being in all those places, means missing a viable audience.
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