The now and next of participatory news

by Steve Earley

Five things news organizations
should be doing now

• Be social on social media: Converse with your audience on social media platforms it is using. People, not machines, should maintain feeds, and these people should act like people. Don't dump batches of headlines at fixed points during the day. Do conduct an ongoing conversation about the news and your community that extends your content and recognizes others who do the same.

• Get moving on mobile: All news organizations should have a basic mobile presence. If you're not establishing your brand on this emerging platform you'll be at a distinct disadvantage when it really takes off — which it will, very soon. A stripped down version of your main site sized for devices' smaller screens will get you started. Even pointing mobile users to RSS feeds is better than nothing.

• Here's the scoop: You can't scoop yourself: Stop thinking in terms of print versus Web, us versus them. Start thinking in terms of one multi-platform news organization. To promote this culture, get your print/broadcast and Web staff interacting and crossing over into each other's roles.
  

• "Cover what you do best. Link to the rest.": No one can cover everything, so why break your back trying, especially at a time when journalists are being asked to do more with less? Your audience wants quality information. It doesn't care where it originated. Neither should you.

• The UGC 1-2-3: Users are generating content, and, as mobile devices proliferate, they're only going to generate more. Yes, not all user-generated content is exceptionally, um, useful, to news organizations. But, especially in breaking news situations, some of it can be very useful. The news organizations that get their hands on the useful stuff are the ones who have established frameworks for 1) soliciting, 2) reviewing and 3) publishing audience submissions.

Five things news organizations
should be doing next

• Location, location, location: The mantra increasingly applies to a lot more than real estate. This is a product of the coming mobile revolution. One of the many bellwethers that location's taking off is location-based social network Foursquare, which, like Twitter two years before it, was the darling of South By Southwest this spring. News organizations will need to be geotagging content and thinking about how having news with them all the time changes the way people consume it. The semantic where is becoming the sixth "W."

  

• Dive into data: There is an exorbitant amount of data on the Web. But very little data can talk with other data. If Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web, has his way, that's about to change. Berners-Lee is the most prominent but far from the only evangelist for Linked Data, the concept that common identifiers for online datasets can do for data what the hyperlink did for content. Martin Belam, information architect for the Guardian, recently outlined several ways news organizations could leverage Linked Data for both of their external audiences — consumers and advertisers — as well as internal audiences — themselves and other news organizations.

• Don't let tethered tie you down: Reaching the growing number of users who access information on tethered devices like the iPhone and iPad requires formatting content for proprietary platforms. No news organization can serve them all, and small organizations might struggle to tailor their product for even just the top one or two devices. Outlets should research what platforms their audiences are using, identify which would be most profitable to develop for, and become comfortable with the fact that some are going to have to be ignored.

• Out context the competition: We live in a what's happening now world and a cursory look suggests the news cycle will only continue to compress. But look closer and you'll see audiences starving for context. Anyone with a mobile device can compete with journalists on what's happening now, but journalists are uniquely suited to explain what just happened and what might happen next. They can make time for this important explaining by letting citizen reporters cover the less consequential breaking news — the kind that's news only because it's breaking.

• New (much) wider, (much) taller format: News presentation specialists, who until very recently designed exclusively for formats of less than 720 square inches, are starting to design for one that's 196,950,000 square miles. That's right, augmented reality transforms all of Earth into a potential news page. From news content — hold a device up to a building and see news articles and data related to the organizations based there — to advertising content — hold a device (or print product) up to a screen and see yourself inside a 3D commercial — AR offers a world of possibilities.