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.

I want two things in the morning, at the same time - a newspaper and a coffee. I can't imagine I'm unusual in that. But trying to find the two together is harder than you'd think.

Take this morning. I drove into town round the waterfront. There's a guy outside Hammerheads who sells coffee there, but no newspapers as far as I can gather so I didn't stop.

Instead I pushed on and parked my car in the Civic carpark. I walked to the nearest coffee shop on Queen Street. Coffee, but no paper. I looked in at another three coffee shops in the same block. Same deal: coffee, but no newspaper.

And not a newspaper honesty box in sight nor a cheerful chap selling them on the corner.

I had to go out of my way to buy a paper. Why?

And this in times of falling circulation. By all means newspapers should focus energy on expanding their product range to include the web where so many of their readers are migrating, but let's not forget the basics - if you can't find a paper you can't buy it.

The other day a friend said: I'd subscribe to the paper if I could just have the bits that I want. I don't want the business section or the sport section or the careers section, just the news section and magazines.

She doesn't like watching unread papers go straight into her groaning recycling bin. Me, I've no time for the magazines and would be happy with News, Business and a Technology section if there was one. You might well opt for News, Sport and nothing else, or just Sport.

This is, of course, exactly what we are able to do online by using an RSS aggregator or customisable homepage.

But what if newspapers could do it too? What if they could nail a way to distribute different configurations of their sections - perhaps a set number of options: the full edition, business edition, lifestyle edition or sport edition, say - and only make them available to subscribers. I don't know enough about print configurations or distribution channels to know if this is at all possible. Any thoughts?

It came to mind when I was re-reading a post from John Duncan, a former managing editor of the Observer and now an international newspaper consultant. Mr Duncan, who is unconvinced that the economics of online newspaper publishing stack up, says this: "The effort expended on making newspaper websites passably useful online would be far better spent on making newspapers more competitive and useful in print.

"More flexible distribution would be a start, so we could offer a different product to different people and get it to them when they want to read it. Better products help too. The Observer sells more copies now than it did in 1995 thanks to the past seven years of product innovation."

His post has been kicking around for a while but is worth a read. If you're a digital skeptic it will make your day. He's done some fairly comprehensive comparative maths on the Guardian online vs print and come up with the following: "Even after 10 years of spectacular growth, with broadband penetration now high and newspapers said to be in danger of total irrelevance, The Guardian is still read by vastly more people in the UK than Guardian Unlimited."