Joanna Geary posted this on her blog a month back, but I've only just found it in my feedreader. It's worth reposting:
Jeff Jarvis at SXSW: Advice to UK regional journalists from Joanna Geary on Vimeo.
Jeff Jarvis - associate professor at City University of New York's Graduate School of Journalism, Guardian columnist and author of Buzzmachine.com - speaking at SXSWi 09.
Jeff suggests that journalists need to establish personal connections to an audience in order to survive the current industry turmoil.
Jeff Jarvis at SXSW: Advice to UK regional journalists from Joanna Geary on Vimeo.
Jeff Jarvis - associate professor at City University of New York's Graduate School of Journalism, Guardian columnist and author of Buzzmachine.com - speaking at SXSWi 09.
Jeff suggests that journalists need to establish personal connections to an audience in order to survive the current industry turmoil.
Maybe I'm just old-skool, but working on personal connections with readers was something I was always taught to do. Readers, especially if you cover a niche like local news or a specific bit of technology, often turned out to be your best sources for good exclusive stories.
I suspect, again, this might just be a UK/US divide. I've always got the impression that US journalists were much less engaged generally with both their readers and they market they covered. But that's just my opinion :)
I've found, with the journalists I've worked with, a tendency amongst some to mentally classify readers as either "contacts" or "readers", usually based on how important they are within their companies.
And that's a bit of a mistake, in my opinion, as some of my best stories have come from low-rankers, while the more senior people tend to be tightly controlled by the PR machine.