Like Amy Gahran, I like Jan Schaffer‘s post, “Construct Your Community’s Info-Structure,” on the Newspaper Association of America’s Imagining the Future of Newspapers blog:
News organizations need to construct the hub that will enable ordinary people with passions and expertise to commit acts of news and information. You need to be on a constant lookout for the best of these efforts, trawling the blogosphere, hyperlocal news sites, nonprofits, advocacy groups, journalism schools and neighborhood listservs. Your goal is to give a megaphone to those with responsible momentum, recruit them to be part of your network, and even help support them with micro-grants.
What Jan is talking about is the key to 21st century media strategy: Build a network, not a destination. In the past week or so, I’ve come across two other thoughtful posts built on similar thinking.
Jeff Jarvis writes about Glam, a network of Web sites focusing on content of interest to women. Using a graphic prepared by Glam’s CEO, Jarvis shows how Glam has made itself bigger than iVillage, a more traditional woman-oriented portal. Rather than build all the content, and try to channel traffic to the iVillage.com domain, “Glam finds the good blogs and creates a relationship,” Jarvis writes. “It features good content from them on Glam and also sells ads on the blogs, sharing revenue with and supporting those bloggers. It now has about 400 publishers creating about 600 sites and Arora said that some make multiple six figures a year.”
Glam “is a content network,” Jarvis writes. “But they don’t create all the content. They curate it. So we should curate more as we create less.” It’s interesting to think about media organizations as content curators, in addition to content creators.
The other noteworthy post is a comment from Craig Stoltz in a long thread of comments on John Kelly‘s Voxford blog, reacting to David Leigh‘s Guardian essay, “Are reporters doomed?”
Today there was a major earthquake in Chile. The New York Times (just to pick on the big dumb kid at the back of the class) has a 16-graf news story on its Web site. It has a map, a photo and two hyperlinks …
If I were a multimedia news editor (I’m not), when the news came across my screen I’d have fired up the browser and tracked down some shaky-cell-phone video. I’d have posted a Google map of the affected area and put a fast-typing, Web-savvy staffer on the task of harvesting the best UGC and geotagging it to the map. I’d have my most ferociously focused and gifted newshand craft 300 highly compressed and brilliant words, culled from news service reports and UGC, like those newsmagazine write-throughs but done in real time. I’d link to a Flickr photo gallery that aggregates images in real time. I’d have a newsbox that updated all day with the latest facts, and I’d have an editor from the South American desk scour for blog entries of the moment.
Or I could have done what some poor, habituated, hidebound, put-upon schweck in the Times newsroom did: Order up a 15-graf ho-hum, put a postage stamp photo on the page and a dead .gif map, and be done with it.
If this is the baby, then I say pitch it out with the bathwater, and smack its shabby butt on the way down.
Editors and writers will continue to produce this sort of outdated … typing for as long as they can get away with it — until someone holds a gun to their heads, says we can’t keep doing this, that it’s time for a major change in how we do business in a newsroom.
The multimedia production I’ve described above is *not* more expensive than the 16-graf ho-hum. I’d argue it’s better, more complete journalism than the words-alone approach.
Jarvis is supporting a Web-centric, networked form of publishing. Stoltz, a consultant and former editor at WashingtonPost.com, is arguing for a Web-centric, networked form of journalism. Both are suggesting that publishers and journalists need to take advantage of the Internet’s unique capacity to link content and people in new and useful ways.
