June 27, 2006

The Platform Doesn't Matter (Yes It Does)

A quote in today's Tennessean from Tennessean President and Publisher Ellen Leifeld got me thinking about something I wrote here at BillHobbs.com a few weeks ago:

The reality of the news business in the modern era is that, via blogs and related technologies, a newspaper like The Tennessean can much more rapidly add a digital video component to its news-gathering and news-distribution than a TV news operation like, say, WKRN, could add a print component. That's because it's much less expensive for a newspaper to produce and publish web video than it would be for a TV news channel to launch a printed news publication.

When The Tennessean decides to get serious about the blogosphere and the new era of news production and distribution enabled by cheap digital technologies, it can blow the competition away in a matter of months. The competition is no doubt hoping The Tennessean never realizes this.

Here's what Leifeld had to say today:

Local newspapers, more than any other media, are in a unique position to transition to any platform because it isn't the platform that matters. It's the ability to gather and disseminate news and information," she said. "Who else in the greater Nashville area has more than 250 journalists gathering news and information?

Of course so can any other printed publication in town. Nashville Business Journal, for example, could supplement its printed and web versions with video reports online when the story calls for it. Groundbreaking for Nissan's new Franklin headquarters, for example, would have been a prime opportunity for The Tennessean, or NBJ, or the Williamson Herald, for that matter, to post a video report from the event minutes after the event occurred - or even stream it live.

The platform doesn't matter. But in some very crucial ways the platform does matter. A few months ago I spoke to the members of the Society of Professional Journalists chapter at Tennessee State University about the role of blogs in the news business. I spoke about how independent blogs are impacting the news media, and how blogs, including this one, have broken news stories right under the noses of the big media. But blogs and other online/digital formats such as online video and podcasts, are important platforms for the economic future of the news industry for the simple reason that young adults aren't reading newspapers.

I was speaking to a classroom filled with about two dozen student journalists, and yet when I asked how many of them read a newspaper, not one raised a hand. But when I asked how many read news online, most of them did. And these were journalism students. If today's journalism students aren't picking up printed newspapers, but are reading news online, the platform does matter.

It's good to see The Tennessean waking up.

Update: Poynter Online has a relevant column today by Poynter Institute researcher Rick Edmonds, which examines the business prospects for the newspaper industry as it transitions to the online world.

"No one in the newsroom fails to see the change (in how people consume media)," said Robert W. Decherd, Chairman, President and Chief Executive Officer of Belo Corp., which owns the Dallas Morning News. So at the Dallas Morning News, for example, editors are tackling questions like "how do still photographers, Pulitzer Prize winners, get excited about videography for the Web?"

...Decherd was one of several presenters -- including Janet Robinson of New York Times Co. -- who didn't even mention newspapers until well into their 50-minute presentations. Belo has rewritten its mission statement defining itself as a "journalistically-based media company." But that doesn't mean they have forgotten, as Decherd put it, about "vigorously supporting the marketing position of our traditional businesses" as the big push shifts to the new. In other words, he argued, the legacy businesses of print and local television need to be kept as strong as possible.

Specific discussions of journalism are always rare at these meetings, and the couple of exceptions matched the general theme of enthusiasm for the new. Lee Enterprises presented several extracts from a citizen's forum on BillingsGazette.com -- one from Michael Running Wolf titled "Tribe wants justice, equity, not war" and another on a series of neighborhood cat killings. Each drew more than 40 posts within a day or so.

With 90 papers to choose from, Gannett represented as a highlight a recent push for "local, local content" at the (Fort Myers, Fla.) News-Press, where a cadre of high-tech mobile journalist roams the neighborhoods posting text, audio and video direct to the web -- some of it later "reverse-repurposed" to the newspaper itself..