Outside.in Will Save Newspapers!

In a speech given by Steven Johnson, founder and executive chair of Outside.in, he explained that in order to understand what is going to happen to newspapers in the future, we need to look at what happened to other content verticals in the past.

“In the old days, it might have taken months for details from a John Sculley keynote to make to the College Hill Bookstore; now the lag is seconds,” writes Steven. “Today’s media is in fact much closer to a real-world ecosystem in the way it circulates information than it is like the old industrial, top-down models of mass media. It’s a much more diverse and interconnected world, a system of flows and feeds.”

Based on this information, Silicon Alley has outlined a three tiered plan that they believe could be the answer to the woes of the newspaper industry.

Aggregate
Dynamically sourcing every single local piece of content and organizing by discrete neighborhoods — or even specific addresses — gives the kind of targeted and timely local coverage that print newspapers never dreamed of attempting.

Curate
Historically, editors make curatorial decisions about their own internal content — which stories to assign, what to feature on page one. Going forward, those types of curatorial decisions will be made on other people’s content as well.

Network
Newspapers need to become the network. They need to partner with the blogs and hyperlocal media properties in your market and represent their inventory. This will allow newspapers to compete for sizable budgets in their markets and leverage their longstanding relationships with local merchants that the big networks don’t have.

Sounds like an interesting plan, but is this something big conglomerates like the New York Times can do while struggling to resolve their own financial turmoil or is this the baton that will be taken up by fledgling organizations, essentially creating a new higher order in the media industry. We look forward to seeing how this progresses.

Launch a social media campaign that will build your brand and deliver results in our online Social Media Marketing Boot Camp starting June 7. Speakers include Abigail Cusick (Bravo Digital), Gregory Galant (Sawhorse Media), Alex Leo (Thomson Reuters Digital), Jim Tobin (Ignite Social Media), and many more. Read the reviews.