Whitney Houston's death was first reported on Twitter. The Arab Spring was both organized and disseminated on Twitter. Twitter has even started a new account just for "spotlighting best practices and innovative uses of Twitter by journalists and newsrooms." That said, social media is not being utilized everywhere-in particular, not in local newsrooms.
Callum Borchers, of Harvard's Nieman Journalism Lab, reported something interesting Feb. 17 in a blog post entitled "The Boston Courant: Proud not to have a website until the owner sees ‘a profitable end game.'"
The Boston Courant, a weekly newspaper, is staying profitable in the age of the Internet by staying offline. The business logic is straightforward: "If the Courant had a website, some segment of its readership would ditch print. The paper wouldn't lose subscription revenue, since it's free anyway, but [publisher David] Jacobs strongly believes the digital migration would cripple ad sales." This is basically the same problem facing most newspapers, the only difference being that Jacobs is very explicitly avoiding the Internet, waiting for a proverbial Superman to create a business model for him. The Internet is the future of news-except for local news.
The history of media is essentially a history of technology. The first modern newspapers were local, and even when certain papers, like The New York Times, became important enough to gain a global readership, they still followed the same format. After all, there's only so much you can do with a printing press. Many newspapers even reacted to the Internet in similar ways, offering their content online, usually for free, gradually accepting linking and other Internet norms.
In some ways, the Internet revolution isn't new. Look at Twitter: With only 140 characters at a time, Twitter looks a lot like a news ticker filled with headlines, only moving a bit more quickly. New York Times media columnist David Carr agrees, stating, "In the current paradigm of media organizations and Twitter personalities, good reporters are expected to serve as a kind of wire service for information, and that includes providing links to important stories that they themselves may not have written."
But look at the major stories broken on Twitter-they're all stories with a widespread audience and an inclination to be shared. This doesn't apply to local news as much, because the stories tend to affect a relatively small area with relatively few members. The local stories that accidentally go viral (like the Oct. 29 story in the Daily Cardinal, "Occupy Madison loses permit") are just exceptions that prove the rule. Sometimes, but not usually, weird or otherwise notable things happen everywhere. Twitter works well, but it's not a place for local news.
Of course, since the amount of content that can be shared on the Internet-especially on Twitter-is staggering, its increased use has come with the usefulness of aggregators, which are sources that collect the best stories from a variety of places, judged by them, for their readers. This also won't work very well at the local level, because there probably aren't enough stories for aggregation to be necessary, let alone useful. And this is still about news in the old sense, stories published without conversation. A major component of social networking is breaking down the barrier between publisher and consumer. In a sense, everyone is a publisher now. But just like before, local news sites aren't viral, and they won't be able to take advantage of this.
News distribution will continue to look like Twitter. But remember that the benefits of this kind of service-spreading information as quickly as possible to as many people as possible-doesn't benefit local news operations as well. That means the future of local news hasn't been discovered yet. Local news might become extinct if we forget it's value, however, it could become more important than ever. And we'll probably hear about it on Twitter.
Zach is a freshman majoring in computer science. Think Twitter does more for local news than Zach believes? Please send all feedback to opinion@dailycardinal.com.
