Another day, another story about the future of newspapers.
I’m going to chose one quote from today’s story in the NYT and dig in a bit.
“Industry executives who once scoffed at the idea of an Internet-only product now concede that they are probably headed in that direction, but the consensus is that newspapers going all digital would become drastically smaller news sources for the foreseeable future.”
That does not have to be true.
There are thousands of local bloggers who are living in, involved with and writing about their local communities and neighborhoods.
These are the stringers of the future for these news organizations!
They will not be on payroll. They will not require proactive editorial oversight. They will bubble-up stories that the fully-staffed newspapers of old would never have found.
What they do require is traffic to their sites via links from newspaper sites and, ultimately, revenue generated by newspaper sales teams who can leverage their great relationships with local advertisers.
Newspapers, please aggregate what is already being written in your markets. You can then point your readers to the best and hold on to your position as the arbiter of what’s important.
Of course, we at Outside.in would be happy to help.
Go to http://outside.in/publishers for more info.
