Mar
6
Web 2.0 Leads MSM Evolution
March 6, 2007 | |
Many members of the mainstream media (MSM) are dinosaurs just waiting to die. But a few are starting to figure out how to evolve into relevance. USA Today has begun the evolutionary journey with its relaunch of USAToday.com.
The updated website is laden with Web 2.0 features like dynamic content-sharing and recommendation tools, video and blogs. It has a new widescreen format and expanded user-profile and social networking capabilities.
The New York Times, too, is trying to regain relevance in this new era. In a memo to staff recently, Editor Bill Keller wrote, “For this Presidential election cycle we are organizing our coverage in a new (for us) way: for the first time, a central political desk will supervise coverage for the newspaper and the web. This new desk will include not only newspaper editors, but also people with experience in web production, database reporting and software development. Newspaper and online journalism will get equal emphasis–we are well past the day when we can think of ourselves as a newspaper with a Web site on the side–for an audience that now expects its political news to arrive in full multimedia, interactive glory.”
It’s not too late for the rest of the dinosaurs but they need to move fast. The asteroid is getting close.
