We’ll get to the UBJ’s social media strategy, and how we hope to use it to better and more quickly deliver information relevant to you, in a second – but first, I want to talk about my mother.
This week was my mom’s birthday, and, thanks to Facebook – which, honestly, is the only way I remember the birthdays of most people in my life these days – I was able to post a message to her first thing in the morning, along with a sweet picture that my niece took of the two of us. It was a nice, public gesture, which several of our friends and family have been able to share in. It took me, tops, five minutes.
But my mother didn’t raise me to get away with cheap gestures. Modern technology is no substitute for an old-fashioned two-way conversation, complete with “I love you” in our real, human voices, even if it was transmitted between two cellphones 100 miles apart. The convenience and ease of social media did not relieve me of my traditional duty as a son. I could wish Mom a happy birthday quickly and easily, but I also had to do it right.
A discussion along these lines is happening in newsrooms worldwide in the 21st century, between those invested in traditional ways of publishing information, and those who are looking at the new ways people actually get informed. Entrenched publishers and editors, with millions of dollars and generations of workers invested in putting ink on paper, are trying to figure out how to deal with an audience who is using new technology. Newspapers, some say, with their big, gray walls of text, are obsolete. Print is dying.
Which brings us, finally, to social media. In our own newsroom, we’ve been (virtually) passing around an article by Ryan Holmes, posted on LinkedIn, with the attention-grabbing title “Can Jeff Bezos Fix the Washington Post With Social Media?” One of the tips that Holmes, CEO of social media company HootSuite, offers for Amazon founder Bezos and others who may find themselves in charge of a traditional media outlet is to embrace velocity. To compete, he says, the Post and others should produce “quick, short-form stories pushed out nearly as fast as the news breaks (i.e. exactly the kind of continuous news stream that online publishing is ideally suited to).”
Of course media is changing. It always has, as anybody who has seen a cave painting or a Gutenberg Bible can tell you.
But do we need to abandon tradition entirely? Is there room for more than 180 characters in the modern attention span? In the struggle to publish things now, can we also remain mindful of the old-school, time-consuming values of research, verification and analysis – which Holmes admits are “part of the intrinsic value of a news site”?
At UBJ, we say “yes.” Because the thing about old-school and new-school is that we need each other. New media shows which way we’re going. Traditional values keep us honest while we’re getting there. Happy birthday, Mom.
