Friday, February 18, 2005

The limits of We Media

Mary Lou Fulton on Morph outlines a few thoughts on where participatory journalism might take newspapers.
"While I am a passionate advocate of citizen journalism and believe it will play a huge role in the industry's future, I don't believe 'We Media' is the silver bullet for the newspaper industry. If we converted all of the world's newspapers to citizen journalism products tomorrow, that by itself would not ensure our survival."
It's hard to argue with that. The full range of technical tools and cultural processes need to be brought to bear on this problem.
"Consumers today use multiple products and multiple platforms for information. Maybe the subscriber of the future only gets the weekend paper and gets customized e-mail content plus SMS text alerts from us during the week? How do we transition away from the 7-day subscriber mentality and orient our product design and sales processes around more fluid kinds of consumer scenarios?"
Newsrooms are going to have to consider these sorts of suggestions, and either better them or test them in order to keep existing readers and, hopefully, attract new readers.

No comments: