March 19, 2009
Horse Power 58 Beryl Love, Reno Gazette-Journal
In this episode of Horse Power I chat with Reno Gazette-Journal Executive Editor Beryl Love about news, interactive media and the continually expanding, and graying, area where they collide.
The RGJ is engaged in a lot of interactive efforts to bring community and news content to the public on the web, and a lot of them involve user generated content. Through the years news institutions like the RGJ have had some successes and some failures with this. Beryl says that some of their initial efforts didn’t pan out due to a misunderstanding of what involvement the readers really want to have.
Blogging and social networking are commonly thought of as threats to big J Journalism. But with the Seattle Post-Intelligencer ceasing publication of the Dead Tree Edition, and the RGJ and Gannett as a whole engaging in blogger relations and online community outreach and management, we are seeing the two become even more mixed. The eventual result will be institutional and grass roots Journalism becoming even more connected and dependent on each other.
With the acquisition in the last year of Metromix and Ripple6, Gannett has jumped into the nitch social network market, and with great initial success. The Reno Metromix site generates traffic well in excess of similar markets, and social communities like MomsLikeMe are bringing people together to interact while providing valuable user analytics for advertisers.
Beryl also laments the fact that the content management system used by rgj.com and most other Gannett papers is not able to give the community of bloggers what they really want to participate. Beryl however suggests a better solution that would allow bloggers to easily participate while exchanging content for readership in a way that bloggers and news institutions can benefit from and be happy with.
In the end we’ll all have to work together to prevent the loss of either the hard and heavy Journalism News institutions with revenue streams, overhead and full-time staffs, as well as the lone gunnman blogger exposing the stories the paper can’t and won’t cover, even if that occasionally includes his nephew’s B-Day party at Chuck-e-cheese.
Thanks Beryl!
-Mike
ps The video is slightly truncated, but the audio version is the full conversation.
Posted in Horse Power Podcast, Reno-Tahoe, Social
