Mark Briggs talked today about the changing newspaper industry, hyperlocal information resources, the pro-am journalism concept and what he is up to with his next venture. I will post on that latter point in a day or so, but for now I'll start with the good and the bad news.
The bad news is that Mark's last day at the Tribune is Friday. They will be losing an excellent resource for technology, editing, reporting and training when he is gone. The good news is that the Online Editor position is important enough that they will be hiring someone into the position he is vacating, and Mark is part of the selection process. He assures me that they have excellent candidates and that, I am glad to hear.
What is too bad is that when he leaves, the Online in the South Sound blog will close down, and the new person will blog post directly into the Inside the Newsroom blog. Apparently there will be some consolidation of blogs to account for the fewer number of contributors available to post. I understand that the Online blog had a pretty narrow niche, but it was my niche and I will miss it.
There are almost 30 blogs on the The News Tribune site, and they are the number two trafficked section of the online News Tribune site. That is pretty amazing. Which section is number one and the only higher trafficked area? Why the front page of course. That should speak to the value of blogging in the news process, and I hope that they continue to be prominent on the site, whether or not the same number of reporters are providing content there.
I want to mention two trends he pointed out among the many examples he gave of the changing newsscape. One was the web site www.momseattle.com. This is a community driven, editorially controlled web site targeted toward Seattle Moms and owned and operated by the Seattle PI. My questions are, is it profitable for them? Can it be sustained? Is it helping the newspaper as a whole? If the answer to these questions are all yes, or on there way to yes, I would like to make an introduction.
TacomaMama - New Tribune, NewTribune - TacomaMama
Actually, I know that introduction has been made, but I just thought I would do so again.
Secondly, I was surprised out how newspapers have adopted Twitter for a variety of uses. For examples check out the following resource and select a few of the papers listed. Not just headlines being sent, but an active news source being utilized.
Next up for Mark are speaking engagements in Barcelona and Lisbon. Luckily, he will only be visiting and has no plans to leave the Tacoma area.
1 comment:
I think it's crazy that newspapers are twittering now. It's like company's trying to get on the green bandwagon. The new fads of twitter and blogging are what newspapers are catching up with.
I really think newspaper's competition is blogging. If the blog was second to news in trafficking, it's obviously what people are interested and what they could be more interested in eventually.
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