Is the Demise of Newspapers Bad for Reputation Management?

I spoke at a Conference Board program in New York this past week. The topic was about corporate communications at Web 2.0. There was a lot of talk from the participants about the demise of newspapers and what will happen when there is not an editorial filter on ideas so that "quality" wins out over quantity.

The newspaper business model has been broken for a long time. When I was in graduate school--a long time ago!!--we did case studies on the newspaper business and we could not figure out why the companies maintained printing presses and delivery trucks. Their core competence is news gathering and reporting, not production. But, their model hasn't changed and now with the decline in advertising, newspapers are having a tough time surviving.

Against this concern about the demise of newspapers was a quote from one young woman who said "if the news is important enough, it will find me".

Newspapers came into being because people wanted information about things that affected their lives. Because of the economies of scale in gathering and distributing the news, it only made sense for a few large companies to dominate the news business. Few others could afford it. The Internet has changed that model. We have millions of bloggers and microbloggers (Twitter as an example) who are gathering news and disseminating it instantly and for free. The young woman is right, the news is finding her.

At the same time, I can understand the concern over whether of not the information out there in cyberspace is of the highest quality. We are in a transitional phase right now. It is being fueled by a number of factors: the demise of newspapers, the rise of blogging, and the increasing importance people place on connecting and hearing from "people like me". We are finding the news--or it is finding us. It is news from people we trust because they think like us. Not all of it is on the Internet. Some of it is on Fox News, Air America, and other politically-based or politically-biased news sources. But, long ago David Brinkley defined bias as anything someone doesn't agree with.

So, people are comining together and becoming each other's news source, brand guidance, etc. It is a transition to a society where the individual is in the center, not the news media organization.

Will this impact reputation? Of course it will. But, the same basic tenets of good reputation management will hold. We cannot talk at people, but we must dialog with them; we need to be real and transparent; we need to be honest, not just talk about it; and we need to be more concerned with the value proposition of those we want to influence than in what we want them to believe. If we focus on authenticity and transparency, we will continue to have good reputations regardless of what happens technologically.