Mobilizing community news mobilizes community growth
We want to tell our story: an award-winning boutique publishing group in the midst of a revolution.
Our goal is to adapt and tailor all our product brands to the digital age. We are aggressively moving in that direction, with the help of the company’s first digital strategist, Emily Price, professor of digital communications at Furman University. We are building two websites that never before existed and completely re-envisioning and developing three additional sites. And that’s just for starters.
At the same time, we want to build our product brands and their audiences through calculated social media efforts. We also want to build our local advertisers’ brands and their audiences. All of this in the midst of the mass mobilization of communication devices and channels.
Local news aggregation and dissemination are both absolutely vital to building and growing communities. The creators and distributors of hyper-localized content are not just responsible for raising awareness of governmental, educational, environmental and cultural affairs – they are key players in local economic development.
We founded the Greenville Journal in 1999 to fulfill a reader demand for a more expressly localized news publication, and to fulfill advertisers’ demands for a more targeted advertising vehicle. Since then, we have always viewed readers and advertisers as a group of shareholders in our products, and have always done business with a focus on the development of personal relationships and direct communication between the publications, readers and advertisers.
We all know the availability and spread of local information helps build community knowledge, identity and calls to action. Successful local publications such as ours have always been community mobilizers. But how does the mobilization of communication devices – and perhaps most notably, all of the new vehicles and genres for storytelling that have resulted from the rise of mobile devices – affect the community publishing model?
How do the values of local publishers, and the products they offer readers and advertisers, change in this new communicative landscape? How do the true community publishers, who were already producing niche and hyper-targeted media products, adapt to this new value in all other competition – including digital user-generated content? And how do we bring our advertisers along with us?
In the wake of this new digital initiative and the articulation of a vast digital strategy for a local publisher, what will we discover about local news consumption in the age of mobilization?
We’re looking forward to finding out.
