Journalism is often about journalists having the story, rather than if the audience actually want the story. It is with this in mind we need to refocus on our audience, and talk about them as the community formally known as the audience.
This was advice given to CJS students by The Times‘ Community and Web Development Editor, Joanna Geary. She spoke of how while the barriers for talking and sharing have collapsed, it has not turned out as realistically as first hoped. We now have to think about how we can talk to readers directly. This is why Joanna took the decisive step to personally email the top 500 commentors on the Times website to ask for feedback and suggestions.
I think that newspapers have to try a lot harder to engage with their readers. I, perhaps somewhat biasedly, think that the magazine industry do this a lot more successfully. While newspapers are struggling with ways of putting their content online and working about a business model that will made this financially viable, magazines are just getting on with it.
Two of the best websites out there I believe are Heat‘s heatworld.com and Grazia‘s graziadaily.co.uk. Both of the sites do not give away their respective magazines content, but focus on daily stories that interest their readership. They interact with them through the use of polls, diarys and blogs from some of the writers, and Grazia even has its own vodcast with Grazia TV. They make their websites a destination for their already established community, without compromising their magazine content. In fact, many articles will push for the reader to go out and buy the magazine to find out more about certain things. In this way, there is a symbiosis between the dependency for print and online.
[...] Online Journalism Post LikeBe the first to like this post. [...]