Why are journalists late adopters online?
What is the deal with journalists always being the last ones to this party called the Internet?
First, it was creating Web sites. Next, it was the pay walls falling down. Then, blogging was met with skepticism and took forever to execute properly. And it took forever for Wikipedia to gain some recognition. Oh, and look who just showed up on Facebook.
It’s no wonder that newspaper companies, for the most part, haven’t cracked the code of how to monetize the Internet properly — their foot soldiers aren’t early adopters of the rapidly changing Internet landscape for media.
I think the largest obstacle newspaper companies face is that they’re not setting the standards for innovation online. They’re not creating new ways to distribute and monetize the news. They’re following the trend, not getting ahead of the curve. Yes, there are notable exceptions, like the Las Vegas Sun’s online all-star team, but for the norm is lagging significantly.
I think what WiredJournalists.com is great, because it’s actually ushering out dinosaurs in the newsroom for a more advanced species. But at the same time it’s kind of depressing. Did it seriously take this long for journalists to get excited about social networking? How did they completely miss Friendster, MySpace and even Facebook. When you consider that Facebook really started gaining popularity in 2005 — an eternity of three years ago — you have to wonder what the hell happened.
Newspapers have a terrible history of having the wrong mentality and viewpoint about key developments on the Internet. Here’s how newspapers got each one of those previous examples wrong:
+ Pay walls: Newspapers thought that their paid subscription model would carry over directly to the Internet. They failed to recognize that online consumers don’t like to pay for anything as peer-to-peer networks proved. For years, their pay walls kept out Google, hurt their search-engine optimization and drove away revenue from page view traffic. Finally, they’re starting to wise up and let the information run free and realize that inbound links are valuable.
+ Blogs: Newspapers thought these were online diaries for angst-filled teenagers and leeches just stealing their hard-sourced stories and adding uninspired commentary. Now, you can’t find a newspaper that’s at least attempting to blog in some fashion, although most newspapers aren’t incorporating blogs properly. Still, they seem to be hiring away the more popular bloggers — a group they once despised and refused to acknowledge as journalists.
+ Wikipedia: Newspapers thought that the entire site was full of lies. The everyday user cannot be trusted to write with any authority and wouldn’t be trusted. Turns out Wikipedia became more popular than blogs or newspapers. Wikipedia’s entries have better page-rank values on Google in most cases and have quickly become the source for breaking news in social media.
+ Social networks: Newspapers thought interaction meant e-mail and posting their articles online, direct distribution over interaction. Instead of developing forums, which would evolve into social networks, for their communities to interact with the news and each other, newspapers continued to think the Letters to the Editor page would suffice. Meanwhile, a Harvard dropout created a site that Microsoft ended up valuing at $15 billion, capable of provided targeting online advertising (OK, maybe too targeted) and cornered the ultimate hyperlocal news market.
What this all means is that newspaper companies now have to scramble and try to get the scraps of revenue they missed from their mistakes. Their focus has to radically shift, and it’s disrupting the newsroom and budgets into chaos. Their approach to the Internet was wrong and their assumptions about emerging technologies proved incorrect. They thought they were confronting the same audience, but it was a completely different way to communicate that they either didn’t grasp or couldn’t adapt for.
And now newspapers are paying dearly for that uninterested and dismissive attitude. The lesson here is show up early, not late, to the party — and bring something to share, too.
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