Gannett turns readers into journalists as part of major restructuring
Well, this is interesting. I’m not a fan of a lot of moves that Gannett has made over the years — USAToday is arguably everything wrong with newspapers, and its success has dragged more papers down that same path that will eventually, in my opinion, lead to ruin — but their new change in direction sounds very, very good and forward-thinking:
Gannett, the publisher of USA Today as well as 90 other American daily newspapers, will begin crowdsourcing many of its newsgathering functions. Starting Friday, Gannett newsrooms were rechristened “information centers,” and instead of being organized into separate metro, state or sports departments, staff will now work within one of seven desks with names like “data,” “digital” and “community conversation.”
The initiative emphasizes four goals: Prioritize local news over national news; publish more user-generated content; become 24-7 news operations, in which the newspapers do less and the websites do much more; and finally, use crowdsourcing methods to put readers to work as watchdogs, whistle-blowers and researchers in large, investigative features.
As I’ve said before, local news is king. This is the 21st century, and breaking news, particularly regional, national or international, is covered by a myriad of outlets and, more importantly, readers/customers/whatever have so many options available to them, starting with radio and ending with the Internet, that it’s foolish to assume that they’ll sit around and wait to hear about non-local news from your outlet. The media needs to concentrate on what it has a near-monopoly on: local news.
Newspapers aren’t going away, if one (quite reasonably) broadens the definition to include the Internet. The piece of paper with that soy-based ink that rubs off on your fingers might be in trouble, but newspaper printing presses already print other products anyway. Spin off the printing presses into a separate company and have the news outfit just be one of their many customers. There will always be a market for news, even if the medium changes.
Still, it’s going to be a bumpy road leading to the future:
Above and beyond pink-slip considerations, crowdsourcing journalism raises many other thorny issues, said Korte. The paper recently asked the crowd to weigh in on the grisly murder of a 3-year-old foster child.
“All that water-cooler speculation moved online,” said Korte. The readers were convicting the foster parents before charges were even filed. “We wound up having to close down the message boards until an indictment came down. It’s very hard to separate fact from fiction online, and some people expect that whatever’s on our site undergoes the same degree of scrutiny as what appears in the paper.”
Still, it’s good to see one of the major players making a bold step in what I think history will prove was the right direction.
No Comments »
No comments yet.
RSS feed for comments on this post.
Leave a comment
Line and paragraph breaks automatic, e-mail address never displayed, HTML allowed: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <s> <strike> <strong>
