As local newspapers close, what will organizers do?

Last month I posted about the declining influence of “old media” and the challenges it creates for organizers.

I didn’t expect one month later to hear that our local paper, the Ann Arbor News, is closing, to be replaced with AnnArbor.com

After the news I was talking to the education director at the University of Michigan Exhibit Museum of Natural History, Kira Berman, who told me that one of her key outreach strategies of public events is to get them listed in the paper.

So much for that.

Now, what do we do?

The easy answer is that we need to incorporate new technologies into our outreach strategies.

But it’s not that easy.

The new media do not have the same following that the old, mass media did. In a world of 3 TV networks, each of them had a lot of influence. In a world of 100 TV channels + netflix + insane numbers of YouTube videos + blogs + everything else, nothing has the same influence that the old systems had.

This means 2 thigns:

1. You don’t need to work as hard to get a somebody to carry your story.
2. You have to work harder because you need more somebodies to carry your story.

I still have to think about how we get those more somebodies. Stay tuned.