Sometimes it feels like I work in Sesame Street -
Journalism today is brought to you by the letters D and C... Disruption, Data, Distribution,
and Curation, Collaboration, Content - so a blog with a title like that had appeal before I even started.
Anyway, I read the
post and it didn't so much ring a bell with me as clang one of Poe's '
loud alarum bells'; I mused on it for most of the morning.
I can't say it anywhere near as well as John L Robinson does; he hits the nail right on the head pretty much with this paragraph:
I understand the point he makes as what I had with various communities, at different points in my career, was intimacy with the readership.
I genuinely heard it called that on a number of occasions, and bear in mind this was just at the time Fred and Rose West's horrifying secrets were being revealed; the Citizen's sales figures were at an all-time high, so it was being bought - it just wasn't respected or (I suspect) particularly liked.
There was no intimacy between paper and reader. The old
Grade II listed St John St offices didn't even have - and were unable to install - a disabled access, so if you were in a wheelchair or unable to mount steps, an advertising rep or reporter would have to come and talk to you in the street - how's
that for looking after your customer?
Other papers I've worked on had the same issues - the
Southern Daily Echo didn't have the same feeling of connectivity with its readers as the
The News, Portsmouth - just 15 miles down the M27 - while Liverpool felt connected (there was even a Foning The Echo Facebook group, set up to celebrate that landmark moment in a consumer's life when, while complaining about shoddy goods/services, the local paper is invoked).
Maybe sometimes the physical barriers contribute to that loss of intimacy too - when you close a district office, move from that expensive city centre address to a more remote industrial site, when you shift to automated switchboards or - as Johnson says - start charging for things people would expect to get for free.
However far we've shifted, I think the opportunities for reconnecting (or connecting with new people) are vast, thanks to online tools and social media, and it comes back to those letters D and C.
By disrupting old ways of working - whether it's the full-on change to digital first, or taking the decision to more transparent, or by - we open up new channels to reach people. By distributing work across 3rd party platforms (from
Twitter to
Scribd, Flickr to
What Do They Know? or collaborating with others (blogging an unfolding story, or simply hashtagging a breaking news story), acknowledging that content does not begin and end with a 400 word story and side panel but is maps, spreadsheets, pdfs, photos, timelines, graphics, adverts puzzles, horoscopes... and then there's data and curation, which don't just allow us to do all of the above, they
demand we do all of the above (as does Hyperlocal, I guess).
News
papers have lost their audiences; evening titles managed to balance things somewhat by publishing earlier in the day, and some have shifted to become weekly publications but I wonder how and whether they are reconnecting with people.
As part of my
Journalism Leaders Course studies I've been reading papers examining at
how businesses cope with change. This paragraph...
Some individuals will be able to change and to adapt to even the
most difficult circumstances whereas others will not. This is true for
organizations as well. Some organizations are slow to react to a
challenging environment whereas others are able to do so more easily
Disruption makes for uncertain and occasionally worrying times, but it also clears the way for the new. So I'll say it again: Disruption isn't an inconvenience, it's a lifebuoy.
