Linux magazine senior editor and super-blogger Doc Searls has a prescription for what ails newspapers. Here’s his 10-point plan, which he explains at length here:
1. Stop giving away the news and charging for the archives.
2. Start featuring archived stuff on the paper’s website.
3. Link outside the paper.
4. Start following, and linking to, local bloggers and even competing papers (such as the local arts weeklies).
5. Start looking toward the best of those bloggers as potential stringers.
6. Start looking to citizen journalists (CJs) for coverage of hot breaking local news topics — such as hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, wildfires and so on.
7. Stop calling everything “content.”
8. Uncomplicate your webistes.
9. Get hip to the Live Web.
10. Publish Rivers of News for readers who use Blackberries or Treos or Nokia 770s, or other handheld Web browsers.
Good list.
JD Lasica, founder of Inside Social Media, is also a fiction author and the co-founder of the cruise discovery engine Cruiseable. See his About page, contact JD or follow him on Twitter.
Leave a Reply