The Newspaper Of Tomorrow To Look A Lot Like The Web Of Today?

from the just-saying... dept

Lots of journalists are busy looking for ways to save the newspaper business (which, it's worth remembering, is still quite profitable). There's an interesting article in Business Week about how to save the newspaper business, with a list of suggestions that basically sounds like: "copy all of the good stuff on the web and add good local reporting." It's not a bad starting strategy (even as local reporting budgets are being cut), but simply copying what others are doing isn't enough. Newspapers need to go beyond that to offer something more, and the final recommendation touches on how to do that. It's all about building communities around the paper -- and that doesn't mean just copying MySpace, but about really letting the local community connect with each other over the issues that matter to them. That's where good local reporting can combine with the community to offer something that's both different and compelling.
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  1. identicon
    bigpicture, 30 Dec 2005 @ 5:54pm

    Newspaper Format 21st Century

    Consensus journalism may be OK, but news (it is a "News"-Paper) material still needs to be kept factual and from credible sources. There can be opinion sections, and even opinions about factual material, but these somehow need to be kept distinct. This format can also be a great source of dis-information, if fact cannot be separated from opinion. Also suppose there is a ground-swell of specific opinion about a particular topic, that suggests some sort of political or other action is required. Will there be any mechanism for effective action?

    link to this | view in thread ]

  2. identicon
    jjj, 30 Dec 2005 @ 9:51pm

    Re: Newspaper Format 21st Century

    HOW ABOUT A COMUNITY FORUM

    link to this | view in thread ]

  3. identicon
    George, 31 Dec 2005 @ 2:11am

    Machine

    There's a newspaper machine by my house that eats quarters. Doesn't open or give up a newspaper, just eats the quarters. You can see lots of dents in the machine, likely from all the kicks it's gotten over the years from ticked off people.

    Here's one way how to save the business: How's about finally fixing all those machines so we can actually BUY a paper?

    That would be a good first step. Once you get that concept down, then you should try your hand at the web.

    link to this | view in thread ]

  4. icon
    Rick Gutleber (profile), 1 Jan 2006 @ 1:01pm

    More like the Web news...?

    You mean instead of 6 paragraph stories with the occasional grammatical or spelling error, we'll start seeing 2 paragraph stories with tons of grammatical and spelling errors?

    link to this | view in thread ]


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