I loved this post from Gina Chen last week from her blog. In it, she lists her 10 hopes for journalists for the year. Specifically, I must say she is spot on when she says that journalists need to realize that the downfall of newspapers is not just the economy. She went on to say that the economic recession hastened the decline; however, in a way, that could be good for newspapers. They need to find a solution to their problems, but they wouldn’t have really started unless something like this happened.
I also love her third point.
If you’re treating social media use like this weird techie thing, you’re not embracing it. You’re not figuring out how to use it for journalism. That’s a shame and a missed opportunity. Journalists should be leading in how to use and explain social media to readers, not sitting on the sidelines bragging that you don’t get social media as if that’s something to be proud of.
While I didn’t quite mind writing a story about churches using Facebook to capture a non-church-going audience, I was always questioning whether it was old news to the readers— especially coming from a publication like AnnArbor.com because they were using Facebook and Twitter to get to their readers already.