Someone, a brave someone, from Boston's local TV news scene submitted a question to a panel with representatives from MySpace, Facebook, Eons, IBM, and a virtual worlds builder. She said she wanted to know the role of traditional media in this space, and what road she and her organization should get on for the future of media. Panel members' answers were all over the map, but Jeff Taylor (founder of Monster and Eons) had the start of a thoughtful answer, and his response blended with something someone else said earlier (either Jeff again or perhaps Tom Arrix of Facebook): that if we observe the Super Bowl ads for 2008, we'll notice that the majority of them point us to a Web property. With this as backdrop, here's some advice.
The current champion of this method is NPR[167], which posts all its on-air materials, including longer versions of interviews, on its web site for further review. For people you want to know about, watching or listening to just the snippets that make the news isn't always enough. Having the option to go deeper is a great service that takes advantage of all the quality work a journalistic team has put into the experience.
This provides added value for people interested in a particular story, but it's also clever for marketing and understanding your customer base. We track and observe and understand the behaviors of people so that we may better serve them. That's the first-line value.
Papers and TV are still missing an opportunity to draft independent media makers into their work. They should move to an upstream editorial and curation relationship with people who can go into their own communities, reveal stories of interest to those communities, and then bring this body of work to editors and curators who can understand which of these stories are right for the air, which would do fine on the Web, and which might merit further professional reporting, with a hat tip to the original creator.
Pluck up the best blogs and video blogs in the area. Build community conversation sections, even if that invites critics to come out and shoot at your stories a bit. Gannett did this really well with MomsLikeMe.[168] Build chat rooms for during-the-news discussion experiences. There are tons of ways to empower the voice of your audience to have reciprocal value. These are just a few. You probably have a few more.
Take some of the deep stories and make podcasts out of them. Give us embedded codes for your media. Make a spot for metadata like user tagging. Give us ways to build your media into our sites and spread your word to more sources.
We put a premium on stories of what's going wrong in the world. Of course, it's important to know about some of the bad news that's happening out there, but why doesn't the local news offer stories about where we can help? Why aren't we learning about people doing great work more often? Right now, such stories have a slot at the very end of the newscast, where the two or three people behind the desk make that weird half smile.
Push up the empowerment stories, and bring that into your deep Web coverage as well.