I read an article today about how the online newspapers, or their online versions anyway, experienced record highs in 2008 in online traffic to their websites yet still, their revenues are falling. I asked the question of my Twitter friends "what are they doing to capitalize on all that traffic?"
It seems to me they have a valuable asset that they are underusing in so many ways, especially considering the new social networking mediums. I don't believe I've seen any of them, even the tv network news sites, being interactive with readers enabling them to report on the news, to interact with the news casters and personalities, the journalists, etc. There still seems to be a bit of a wall there.
I do have a number of television news station political reporters linked to me on my twitter (and me to them) ... they at least get it, as do the political parties, even President Obama ... he followed me back ... Thanks Mr. Pres :).
So where are the news media falling down then? Politics discovered the power of social networking in the last 2 Presidential elections, so I'm not surprised at all to find the political correspondents using twitter regularly. I do see some of the big networks with "network" accounts, oodles of followers but they're not following anyone at all. This isn't using social networking, this is just using Twitter as another news feed to tell another audience about themselves. This is not what the world wants.
Tonight I became quite frustrated. It came to my attention through twittering with friends, that NY had a 3.0 earthquake that was felt in NE New Jersey. Being near there in PA, I wanted to know more about what's going on. I could not find news about it anywhere at all!!! Not even the geological society site had it (http://earthquake.usgs.gov/eqcenter/recenteqsww/) about 30 min after I heard about it.
What did I do? I went looking at the big news tv station sites, nothing, went looking for a way to tell them it happened so someone could get the story out, nothing to be found. So I went to newspaper sites, national ones, same story. Then I started carousing local newspaper websites and guess what ... nothing again ... on either front. The news media just doesn't seem to want to hear from us, the "little people" ... they want us to hear them though. Very one-sided.
Perhaps when these organizations begin to take notice of how social networking really works, they realize that they can incorporate their audience's into their list of assets in things like reporting even, that the readers are not just the stupid "eyeballs" that get them advertising dollars but intelligent, knowledgeable people who want to help and participate ... and when they begin to leverage this power, then perhaps they may begin to see some turn-around in their bottom lines.
What do you think? What have been your observations?
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