October 3, 2006

Let's Give Them Something To Talk About

Online Media Daily reports on a survey commissioned by Lexis Nexis that found consumers are more likely to turn to the mainstream media when they want information about urgent matters than to blogs, podcasts or Web-only publications. But will newspapers be around much longer for consumers to turn to? Jeff Jarvis thinks that's unlikely unless they figure out ways to innovate in a crisis.

The big problem with newspapers, as I see it, is that they tell you each morning what happened yesterday - which is a service of decreasing value in the world of 24/7 cable news and high-speed Internet. Traditional broadcast media is better at telling you what is happening now, but tends to be short on in-depth analysis and long on "Ooh! Look at that!" video voyeurism.

Online media can match or even beat the immediacy of broadcast - unlike TV it isn't limited to a certain number of channels - and the virtually unlimited pixels and cheap bandwidth of the Internet, compared to the limited "news hole" of a newspaper, provides unlimited room for analysis, commentary and in-depth coverage that newspapers simply don't have the room to provide.

Online media also has one other advantage that print and broadcast can't match: Interactivity. A newspaper story may spark a conversation in the community - "Hey Martha, did you see what the mayor did!" - but neither newspapers nor broadcast media actively facilitate the community conversation, nor publish much of it beyond printing or airing a few "man on the street" reaction quotes.

Interactive online media, on the other hand, facilitates the conversation. In some cases, it becomes the conversation, as the "consumers" of news become the producers of commentary, analysis and sometimes news itself, publishing via blogs and video blogs and podcasts.

Will newspapers survive? Not if they keep doing what they've been doing for decades. But the news organizations that produce them can survive and thrive, by implementing the best attributes of broadcast and online media - immediacy, depth, and facilitating community conversation - and by remembering that the key part of the word "newspaper" isn't paper.