Traditional journalistic papers need to adapt to new technologies in order to survive.
Print media’s dominance have been shaken by the rise of Internet-only news sites, blogs, and videos. While some decry that is the death of journalism, in reality it is far from it. Print will no doubt stay relevant for the future, but in order to be competitive, newspapers must adapt to the web.
Part of that is evolving human interest journalism. The popularity of blogs such as Humans of New York prove there is a large audience craving stories of everyday people. There is a space online for traditional papers to tell similar stories.
Unconventional tales of person-to-person interaction are finding a home on blogs, online columns, and social media. News organizations should pay attention to these stories and figure out to how complement them in their own spaces.
This includes websites that communicate in ways that are impossible in print. The New York Times broke ground with its multimedia pieces and the introduction of parallax scrolling.
The newspaper boy has been supplanted by social network algorithms that drop tidbits into everyone’s news feeds. Knowing how to make your news accessible and readable through these websites will keep newspapers competitive with each other and with new media institutions.
While we don’t want to see the Globe and Mail become BuzzFeed, these newer platforms have some tricks worth picking up.
