How to beat the online competition

Yes, yes and (sometimes) yes. But Yelvington's points target the practice of journalism more than anything inherent within its structure that would prevent journalists from becoming great online community leaders. Indeed, he wrote, "While I agree wholeheartedly that newspaper journalists should engage as leaders in the community conversation, I think it would be a mistake to overlook the shortcomings and handicaps we inherit from our past."

In short, what's keeping journalists from running great online communities? The fact that, over the past decades, too many news organizations have gotten really bad at journalism.

We don't fact-check enough, especially elected elected officials, which is one reason why the United States is fighting a tragic, pointless, money-sucking war in Iraq. We've failed to properly cover science, which is one reason why we're still having unnecessary political debates in this country over issues such as evolution and sex education in the schools. We write about established beats, instead of the issues that mean more to our readers' daily lives, which accelerates circulation losses. How many papers still have a labor beat? Newspapers cover business, but far more news readers are workers than owners. Who is covering youth sports, music and art, despite the millions of potential future readers who participate in these activities on a daily basis? Heck, with so many Americans taking daily medication for various ills, why doesn't anyone have a prescription drug reviewer?

The quality of one's journalism does not derive from the number of editors who looked at a piece, or the number of different points of view included within it. The quality of one's journalism is measured by its truthfulness and relevance to its intended audience.

The challenge facing newsrooms today is not the blog or discussion board formats. It's not having people untrained in journalism publishing to a global audience. It's competition. It's having to provide better, more accurate, more relevant information than thousands of other publications, after years of limited competition made profit margins fat and newsrooms complacent.

News organizations, and individual journalists, who are willing to blow up their old source lists, trash their establishes editing and production procedures, quit worrying about ticking off some "highly placed" source or advertiser, and instead get back to the basics of reporting, interviewing and investigating can build around them online communities that overflow with great information, growing audiences... and eager advertisers.

Guess what? Some are doing just that, right now. And we'll be writing about them on OJR. Every Thursday, we'll be presenting a feature that looks at online innovation at offline media companies, from newspapers to magazines to TV and radio.

Of course, if you are one of the people, or work for one of the companies, that has had success with building an online audience, we want to hear from you, so we can tell your story. Please e-mail me, using the contact forms here or here, and let me know what you've done, and how you did it.

Journalists can, and should, be the leaders showing people to the information they need in the Internet era. But a J-school degree, or a business card with a newspaper's name on it, provides no guarantee of either audience or influence anymore. Every journalist and news organization that publishes online must be able to beat their new competition with the most truthful and relevant information available, by whatever means of communication necessary to gather and deliver it.

That's what we at OJR are here to help journalists learn how to do. So let's talk.

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