Mainstream Press Finally Realizing That Kids Want To Share News, Not Read News

from the it-took-them-this-long? dept

In an interesting followup to our earlier post about the state of the news business, Robin writes in to point us to a NY Times article all about how a younger generation of news readers now focus on sharing the news, rather than just consuming it. Mathew Ingram highlights the key sentence in the article, from a college student: "If the news is that important, it will find me." Very few mainstream publications have grasped that concept, even if some folks have been saying the same thing for years. It's time for those in the newspaper business to stop thinking of readers as straight consumers. They're distributors, promoters, creators and analysts of the news as well. Once you recognize that, you start to change how you approach the news business. You certainly get rid of paywalls and registration walls, and you start enabling your users to do more, rather than less, with the news.

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