All entries tagged: Charlene Li
Building networks around news
Even though the public’s engagement with social networks is growing strongly, news enterprises have been slow to wade into the social networking waters.
Publishers, and especially editors, still tend to see themselves as curators of content: selecting, generating, massaging and presenting material for the audience they perceive, but not really networking with that audience except in rudimentary ways like comment forums that are not enormously evolved from the old channel of writing a letter to the editor.
A Bivings Group report published in December, “The Use of the Internet by America’s Largest Newspapers” (which I’ve discussed previously) found that while the adoption of individual social media tools (social bookmarking, blogs, RSS, etc.) was pretty strong at the papers in 2008, only 10 percent, or 10 newspapers, had incorporated some form of social networking on their sites. (And I can’t find more than two or three of those — any hints appreciated.)
In any case, those ten newspapers, wherever they are, are still in an experimental stage, and robust social networking built around news is still something to be invented, although various pieces of it are out there. Is it feasible, or necessary? Absolutely — the rest of the web is rapidly moving to, or beyond, the “2.0″ point of socially-networked interactivity; news media are behind the curve. Among other things, by building a social network around, news media can stimulate conversations about news, certainly something that will help news media survive and grow.
One social network connecting many news sites, readers and advertisers would be better than a multiplicity of networks at individual news sites. What should it look like? That’s the problem — we’re still working on it, and not with all deliberate speed or urgency. Here are some links that touch on some aspects of what’s coming. I invite readers to contribute more:
Social networks built around news can’t happen without journalists who are adept at social networking, themselves. Among bloggers, Gina Chen of Save The Media has done a particularly useful series to help journalists get started. If you’re a journalist and haven’t read these, get over there:
