Alt. Newsweeklies Embracing Social Media

Tucson, AZ.
Not all print publications are suffering the same degree of pain during this period of retrenchment for newspaper industry. At the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies' annual convention yesterday, it became apparent that some of the smaller, community-based newspapers are proving more nimble in embracing multiple technology channels for building their businesses that are the larger metropolitan dailies that have traditionally dominated most U.S. media markets.

"As those big guys crumble, it's an opportunity for us," is how one publisher put it to me. "We know that they are stuck halfway between print and the web. And now they have to figure out what to do about mobile. They have far more resources than we do, but they also are much more bureaucratic."

At Thursday's opening session, Rob Curley of Greenspun Interactive advised participants to be "of the web" as opposed to being "on" the web. "It's not about getting people to your site," he said. "It's about getting your site to the people."

This, of course, is virality, the fuel of both web 2.0 and the growing social media universe that is being built around the flow of real-time information, i.e., Twitter. Curley advised the attendees, publishers, editors and other staffers from 130 news organizations based all over North America to avoid trying to create their own social networking subsites:

"You're not going to out-Facebook Facebook...try to integrate Facebook into what you're doing."