Readers should be half of the newsroom
April 22nd, 2008 by bruno boutotAll mass media would benefit from a community of their readers and most are strategically well placed to create one but most of them don’t seem to see why they should do it. #
Jeff Jarvis writes today about Rupert Murdoch’s strategy to attack the New-York Times’ brand. Independently from the Times’ situation, Jarvis’ diagnostic could be applied to any mass media: #
I think the Times has to decide on radical reinvention, a new architecture. You can guess my starting points: a networked structure, a distributed strategy, a community plan. #Jarvis also refers to suggestions he made last month to the Times, using a quote from Fred Wilson: #
The Times should create and sell quality collaborative networks and expand the brand around its value: reporting. (…) And it has to become the product of collaboration with networks and independent professionals and its audience. #The tone may sound apocalyptic, but creating a community is not such a gigantic enterprise: MetaFilter, for example, generates 9.9 millions page views per month and is managed by 4 people. In fact, considering the hardship of mass media on the Web, the cost of creating a community is minimal. #I agree with Fred Wilson here: “I’d make the NY Times all about their audience. Let the people who read the paper have a much larger role in the content that gets published, both online and offline. The best thing about the NY Times is their readers. The only way they can fix their problems is by leveraging them as the other half of their newsroom.”
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It looks like the cultural shift is all that is paralyzing our mass media. #
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