The Evolving Newsroom

Steve Outing has written a good post about people wanting to upload and share 'news' but not necessarily with news or citizen journalist websites.

I’ve started to realize that news organizations would be wise to focus less on creating their own citJ platforms and hoping someone will post something, and more on leveraging the social networks where people already are posting news. My previous post about Twitter touches on this; that micro-blogging service contains (amid all the personal fluff) real news that people are witnessing.

I couldn't agree more. I increasingly see the need for news organisations to get out to where people naturally spend time online - ie talking to friends and colleagues on social networks. That's not only where news companies will find stories, but also where they need to distribute stories.

Life's busy & the web's huge - it's unreasonable to expect that people will be motivated to come to your website every day to read and post news. Much easier for them to engage with you if they regularly come across you on the interwebs as they go about their daily business.

As Steve says, there's no question that people are increasingly comfortable with spontaneously sharing their lives online - it's just a case of being able to filter out the 'what I had for breakfast' posts from the 'wow, I just videoed a tornado outside my kitchen window' posts and aggregating and sharing those that meet the needs of news audiences.