Interaction of regional news-media production and consumption through the social space

Abstract

News-media organisations are operating in increasingly competitive and fragmented markets for audiences and advertising revenues. Through the advent of the Internet, regional news media are experiencing a revolution in their production and administrative processes, such that their survival depends on their ability to find a workable online business model. A growing army of bloggers and amateur citizen journalists now delivers – but rarely edits – content for all media platforms, while new media technologies, combined with the changing structure of regional news industries, are radically changing the ways in which a news-media organisation functions and achieves profitability. Our research seeks to answer the question of how the Internet is impacting on producer/consumer value activities in the regional news media. To answer this question, 15 semi-structured in-depth interviews were conducted at three regional newspapers, followed by a focus group with London-based news-media organisations (including radio and television) and bloggers, which aimed to expand our analysis from its initial focus on the impact of the Internet on print media (paid-for and free newspapers) to that of online co-creation activities. Our findings show that regional news media face fierce competition for audience and advertising from an ever-growing host of other media and advertising mediums, both new and traditional. There is a strategic gap in terms of media organisations' use of the Internet (despite their developing multimedia portfolios) such that they are not fully harnessing the unique potential of social media to deliver engaging user experiences. Regional news-media organisations will probably continue to survive if they can fill the strategic gap through online marketing operations, which offer a highly personalised and ‘hyper local’ community service with instant interaction and self-organising co-creation activities.

Keywords:

• regional news media
• Web 2.0
• Service-Dominant Logic
• co-creation

Notes

¹ A blog is a more dynamic version of a personal website, being updated often on a daily or hourly basis with the most recent entries appearing first (Wall, 2004). Blogs allow ordinary citizens to become content creators, able to publish and potentially distribute their writing globally (Blood, 2002).

² Franklin (2008) notes that newspapers are the dominant regional media supplying news.

³ With the exception of the Western Mail in Wales and the Scotsman and Herald in Scotland.

⁴ Chris Atton's (2008, p. 267) definition of citizen journalism as ‘a philosophy of journalism and a set of practices that are embedded within the everyday lives of citizens, and media content that is both driven and produced by those people … (and whose) practices emphasise first person, eye witness accounts by the participants’ aptly captures the essence of the concept.

⁵ Twitter is a free social networking and micro-blogging service that enables its users to send and read messages known as tweets.

⁶ All the regional newspapers for confidentiality have pseudonyms adapted from Evelyn Waugh, Scoop, Little, Brown and Co., Boston, 1938.