Newspaper business an evolving issue
The role local newspapers have traditionally played in stimulating discussion on community issues may be coming to an end as new modes of communication are ushered in by advancing technology.
A panel of four media experts discussed these changes and their significance on Wednesday in the third installment of the College of Humanities and Social Science lecture series, Tanner Talks.
The panel included Angela Brown, editor of Salt Lake Underground – SLUG – Magazine, as well as Jeremiah Stettler, USU alum and social media manager for Social 5, which is a company dedicated to connecting small businesses to a local customer base. Also included were Keriann Strickland, a lecturer at the University of Utah and senior editor of Iwantherjob.com, and Patricia Quijano Dark, editor of KSLespanol.
According to Stettler, a former editor at the Salt Lake Tribune, several components of newspapers have been in decline.
“The areas we saw that first and foremost would be in areas that social media really isn’t good at. That would be in politics, it would be government… things largely on a state level or a smaller community level that some of those elements have started to go away,” he said.
Part of the reason for this, Strickland explained, is that newspapers have historically packaged more the entertaining stories that people want to read with reports on more impactful issues that keep people informed.
“It’s the reason that the Tribune will pay to send a Jazz reporter to every away game at the cost of thousands of dollars to the paper. What has changed is that you’ve unbundled that content,” she said.
“One of the things with traditional newspapers is that we flip the pages, and if you’ve got a good newspaper with a good headline writer, you’ll stop and read something you would not search for on Google,” Dark said. “Newspaper not only allows all of us in the community to read the same news reporter in the same way on the same event, it also gives us all a broad knowledge.”
Stettler added this unbundling is taking financial toll on newspapers, citing a recent restructuring of Deseret News that ended in layoffs of nearly half of their staff.
“When that happened,” Stettler said, “There was no longer a reporter from the Deseret News who covered the Salt Lake City Council, there wasn’t a reporter from the radio, or the television who did any of that.”
As a result, Stettler continued, when these stories occasionally are covered, much of the context and analysis that would stem from a reporter specializing in the particular area is lost.
“As we reduce resources, there we’re seeing more and more content is driven by government or by press release than through investigation. That’s something I don’t think social media could ever quite fill,” he said.
“I really think that newspapers need to figure out this budget quandary,” Brown said. “Basically, the user paid subscription model is not working. So, what can they do with these downsizes to still provide creative, honest and factual content for the readers out there?”
Brown said SLUG magazine, a free publication, is expanding in areas on new media such as podcasts in addition to the print version.
“I think it’s really important not to get too caught up in the digital age yet because we’re still kind of in this in-between transitional period, and it’s very important in my mind to pay attention to your print as well as your digital,” she said.
The panel, all of whom currently lead careers based in alternative media, also discussed some of the things communities gain by the changing norms in communication.
“The benefit of some of that is some really good niche information,” Strickland said. Strickland is a managing editor for a company that provides social networks for disease-specific communities.
“So if I have, say, diabetes, it’s really great for me to have access to a community of people who are dealing with the same exact challenges that I am on a daily basis,” he said. “You might go to your doctor and get 10, 15 minutes… And that’s when you get online. That’s when you go to WebMD. That’s when you go to diabetic connect or a social community, and what you can get there are people who are able to share those resources, and I think that that’s a really powerful thing.”
Tanner Talks, funded by O.C. Tanner, will continue throughout the school year. The next discussion will be focused on society through religious revolution and is slated for next February. The theme for the lecture series is knowledge and community.
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