Print and social media are NOT mutually exclusive.
I disagree with Sean’s blog post from yesterday. We had a nice little heated debate about it. He felt as though the newspapers reporting on the Facebook acquisition was almost an oxymoron, because, according to him, if you’re reading the newsprint edition of the paper, you don’t care about social media anyway. Wrong.
There are generations that have successfully made the leap to the digital world, but still enjoy and insist upon physically holding a newspaper first thing in the morning with their cup of coffee, or picking one up outside the door of their room at the JW Marriott. And that’s my point. The people that make up the majority of the executive leadership within corporations and small businesses across America fall within this group of us who have a toe in both the traditional as well as the digital world.
These are the folks that realize that in order to be successful, you have to adapt. And we have. And we’ve fully embraced it. But we’re also old enough that we remember doing business before there was email, so we surely still find comfort in throwing on a CD instead of hooking up our iPod, reading a newspaper with our own hands as opposed to receiving alerts on our phones and actually sitting down and reading a book that isn’t online.
Does that make me sound old? Or is that another blog altogether?
{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
Exactly. Count me as one who likes both newsprint and keyboards. I read the newspaper, I read blogs, I listen to cd’s and Pandora. All are tools to fit my life depending on the situation.
I see how poorly I wrote my blog post on Monday. The main point I was trying to make was NOT that social media and newsprint are mutually exclusive. I was using the example of the Facebook/FriendFeed story as an illustration of newspapers and their audience.
Katie, how many times have you opened the paper to see a story and say, “I knew about that yesterday.” That’s my point. Facebook and FriendFeed was a story that had been reported exhaustively on the Web so it shouldn’t be reported exhaustively in print, unless it was done by the hometown paper. In this case, the San Francisco Chronicle.
Our own Express-News ran it as a brief on the front of the business section, which was appropriate.
When day-old stories get huge play with no local connection, it makes me question the judgment of editors who could have used that space for a local story that local readers would want.
Sean
I think you all should have your staff meetings as a series of communi-k.net comments.