"For a very brief period in our country's history, approximately from 1940 to the year 2000...you have a concentration of media where it's a higher barrier to entry. You can't start a newspaper in town, you can't start a TV network. Then the internet blows all that away, and everybody can start web sites, blogs, e-mail newsletters, that sort of thing, until you'll see us reverting back to the free flow of information that's more democratized."
Web browsers opened up a whole new world. Since the 1800s, readers had rarely spoken to newspaper reporters, but the internet let ordinary citizens crash through the gates. Newspapers found themselves being scooped by online newsletters and flooded with e-mailed criticism, even as their profits were pinched by free online competitors. It's a new dialogue which empowers the masses, but it also represents a great opportunity. As newspapers adapt to a changing world, they'll discover that social media can also be a revitalizing force.
Many news sites now require their reporters to publish e-mail addresses for follow-ups, and hundreds of readers are simply leaving comments online at the bottom of articles. It's the beginning of a grand evolution, but newspapers need to reach out to the online community. It won't be enough to understand what social networks can do without also understanding where the social networks are. The market is dominated by a handful of major players, and these sites have tremendous potential if you learn how to use them.
Here's some of the best examples of how news organizations can use social media.
Twitter offers a fun way for promoting newly-published articles - and you can also remind readers about scheduled online discussions. But Twitter's also being used as a tool for news gathering, since its updates are searchable, providing real-time reactions to events as they're happening. Twitter's intended purpose is for "status updates," so it's a culture of immediacy where readers expect breaking news. And this makes Twitter especially exciting - it's easy to peck out an update, and they can even be sent from a cell phone.
Twitter limits its post to 140 characters or less, so it's easy to keep readers updated. And loyal readers appreciate the timely reminders, since now they won't just know what the newspaper is publishing, but also when it's first published. But best of all, Twitter creates a sense of community. A Twitter user can read updates from their friends and from their co-workers. But for the first time, a local newspaper can now be a part of the same conversation!
Facebook
Facebook offers tools for hosting online discussions, and records transcripts for later archiving for any readers who couldn't participate. And once users have visited the discussion, they may also add the paper to their list of Facebook friends. Scheduled discussions focus attention on today's hottest topics. Whether it's a chat room or a forum, users enjoy asking their own questions and getting the benefit of a reporter's expertise. But best of all, it can attract users to your paper's page on Facebook.
Sites like Facebook also allows users to share stories instantly to their entire network of friends, so many news sites are creating special links on their pages. "Sharing" tools accompany the articles, which with one click will broadcast their headline to every friend in a reader's social network. And Twitter feeds can even be inserted into Facebook profiles, displaying the status updates on both Twitter and Facebook. Web sites don't just offer interactions - they're even interacting with each other!
MySpace Bulletins
MySpace pages include built-in blogs, which some sites simply use to point "teaser" blurbs for their newest articles. But it's also possible to send bulletins to your "friends" on MySpace. It's worth investing some time in promoting the page, since the more friends that you have, the more people will receive the bulletins! But the real power of MySpace still lies in the sharing tools above, since dedicated MySpace users may have thousands of friends of their own.
This "pass-along" traffic can continue indefinitely, as each friend shares the story with their own unique set of friends. Think of MySpace as a network of networks. By sharing your articles a newspaper has a way to inject themselves directly into that conversation!
StumbleUpon
StumbleUpon may be the strangest social media tool of all. Instead of choosing a web page to visit, StumbleUpon's users gamble on a page chosen at random! But that page is targeted to their particular interests, and StumbleUpon also favors those sites which received positive votes from other users. It creates a stream of new and interesting web pages for StumbleUpon's users, but for newspaper it's an opportunity for new readers. Include links in your articles which allow readers to submit them to StumbleUpon. Since StumbleUpon has 7 million users, it's worthwhile to try to reach them!
Blogs
Some newspapers have established blogs for their reporters, allowing readers to interact with comments left below the stories. But more commonly papers find themselves being quoted by the major blogs. While bloggers often deliver angry and raw opinions, they also represents a vast new audience. Many newspapers try to attract the attention of bloggers by creating online galleries of their news photos or offering online-only exclusives like chats with their reporters.
While there are many ways to reach online audiences, it's important to recognize that the media world is changing. In 2007, America's National Archivist argued that there was a great tension in American publishing. The mass media was centralized into the hands of a few TV networks, "But at the same time you have so many decentralizing elements in the mass media, the bloggers being just one of the major ones, that there's no coherence any longer." But instead of complaining, he concluded that the new media landscape was wonderful.
"There's this great blooming, buzzing confusion in the media world which I think is, by and large, an asset to democratization."