Newspapers, community, relevance

Interesting discussion on journo prof's Mindy McAdams' blog about audience and community.

Mindy posts the following after reading a Clay Shirky post:

Newspapers used to be centered in communities. Now they are mostly not. People in much of North America don’t even live in communities.

Is this why newspapers are dying? Because there are no communities?

I heard about someone asking a speaker how we could get young people to read newspapers. Reportedly, the speaker took rather a long pause before replying. When she did speak, her answer was essentially, "We can’t."

This makes a lot of people feel sad. Others feel angry.

But this is not about newspapers.

It's about what Shirky said: Audiences are not the same as communities, and communities are made up of people talking to one another.

What does a community need? How should journalists supply what communities need?

A lot of responses to her question echoed a consensus that communities haven't gone, but they've changed -- and newspapers aren't catching up.

In one of my first ever blog posts here I was examining why newspapers were unaware of the very own disconnect with their geographic community.

In that post I defined news simply as events that matter. Part of the function for journalism and bloggers alike, then, is to answer: what is it that matters, to whom does it matter, how much does it matter, and why.

Note that nowhere in that equation is "location" a factor: relevance is not geographically dependent. (this is why Im also very passionate about including international news on your local site and making it relevant).

As others have posted , communities increasingly gather around issues or interests. Even your neighborhood association or city council district is driven by issues and problems for that location, rather than some perceived inherent birthright magically bestowed by virtue of its GPS coordinates alone.

So the what and where are a lot less important now than the why and to whom and how much. Newspapers dont -- and wont -- get that.

Again, traditional journalism utterly fails in an evolving social structure, and Im not sure if J schools are correcting it.

The traditional 5Ws and H of journalism - who, what, where, when, why, and how - always focus on the event: who did something, what happened, where and when did it happen, why and how did it happen etc. It doesn't fully take into account the relevance, the degree of shared interest.

Sure the regular 5W and H is necessary, but its nuts and bolts,its surface. In this day and age, thats your start point, not the end game.

Do it again, but for each of those Ws and H, make a substitution of relevance for occurrence, and see how your view of it changes:

What matters in this story? why does it matter? and to whom does it matter? ( and why does it matter to them, which is different than why it may be relevant in a larger sense). Once you identify that "whom", then ask how is it relevant to them, which in turn poses the questions of a) what else may be important to that group and/or b) what other groups may find that issue important. i.e., what diversity surrounds the identified community or the identified issue?

Always ask who else, what else, look for the connective tissues.