Going where your audience is (and newspapers mostly aren’t)

This week I teamed up with an old colleague, Steve Buist of the Hamilton Spectator, to spend a half day or so with editorial staff from the Metroland West community newspapers at their annual Editorial Training Day.

Steve spent an hour and a half offering a highly personalized tour of the web tools he relies on for his – need I say it? – award-winning investigative reporting, with a focus on online court and government documents and databases. Steve has garnered multiple National Newspaper Awards and nominations for his work on topics like the food we eat (A Pig’s Tale), the games we play (Beaten By the Odds) and a series of investigations targeting specific, er, interesting, local businesses and their owners, like Royal Crest Nursing homes, the Great Glasses retail chain and the Grand River Enterprises tobacco empire. Here’s a copy of his slide deck, complete with live links to the web resources he talked about:

For my part I focussed on a discussion about tools community newspapers could use to engage with and reflect the lives of the digital natives in their towns and villages. Newspaper readership among 18-34 year olds is pathetic – and getting more so by the minute. Newspapers used to comfort themselves with the notion that, not to worry, this group would begin to subscribe to and read newspapers as soon as they set down their own roots in the community, as soon as they got married, bought a house and began cutting their own grass.

It hasn’t worked out that way, of course.

I suggested that they and their staffs needed to figure out how to “go where their readers live” online and find ways to engage them there. I  focussed on three simple online tools to use: Facebook, Flickr, and Twitter, offering cautionary tales about being useful, meeting needs and understanding the online culture before you barge in and start promoting yourself. I also pointed them to some good examples of work their colleagues were already doing in this field, notably New Hamburg Independent’s Facebook fan page and Gord Bowes’ Mountain News twitter account.

We had some energetic discussions about how to use Twitter, what might be the expected ROI (return on investment) for spending that time online, and that old chestnut – quality: i.e.  how do you ensure readers photos will be good enough to publish.

Sigh.

Still, about 1/3 the room was already on Twitter (although only a couple were using it professionally) and most everyone was interested in trying out some of the ideas we discussed.

Here’s the slides from my presentation with links to some useful tools (especially for Twitter).

Bill