Citizen Journalist vs. Established Player
Newspapers have done a pretty good job of ignoring the impact of the web as the web has come to play a bigger and bigger role in people’s lives. Print media keeps a steady drumbeat of criticizing blogs, mixed in with sudden spurts of online activity. The Pal-item creates blogs and a “community forum,” then scraps them, then relaunches them.
Frequently, the local Gannett papers seem to decide that they need to be doing something online and throw up a site completely ignoring the local online community that has already been in place. The problem with this is that, although the papers have plenty of advertising power for their online sites, by ignoring existing online efforts they alienate the very folks who would be most likely on get online and make use of their site: those folks already online.
For a flavor of what I am talking about, head over to the Muncie Free Press and check out this editorial by Kpaul
