BLOGS AND TWITTER HELP NEWS ORGS

For several years now, journalists have taken positive steps into the digital age by adding blogs and multimedia to their craft while increasing interactivity and immediacy. Simultaneously, news organizations have shed jobs, and their stocks have taken a pounding on Wall Street.

So why isn’t this strategy working? Because journalism’s brand is broken.

News organizations struggle not only with public perception of journalism but also with brand value in their local community. As I travel and talk with news professionals looking for ways to add Web 2.0 elements—comments, forums and user-generated content—to their online operations, I’m no longer surprised to hear an editor or reporter say, “Readers won’t do that on a news site.”

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Building targeted communities of discourse with a layer of journalism on top can help. The Bakersfield Californian, for example, has been a leader in creating and cultivating such communities with projects like Bakotopia. And the beat blogging movement started by Jay Rosen’s NewAssignment.net is about doing this kind of journalism by convening a community of discourse in the form of an online social network.

To maximize a news organization’s social capital and marketability, its journalism today must be transparent, authentic and collaborative. This is why blogs and Twitter work for news organizations. Neither will replace traditional journalism, and that shouldn’t be the objective. These new digital tools bring journalists closer to readers and readers closer to journalism by removing barriers to a more networked conversation.

They help journalists avoid sounding “hollow, flat, literally unhuman” as Cluetrain warned against. And they build influence for the journalists, which Philip Meyer argued in “The Vanishing Newspaper” leads to economic success.

http://www.nieman.harvard.edu/reportsitem.aspx?id=100689