There was a time when news was local. Every village and town had their own local paper, and people would read local stories. Then the papers got bought up, dismantled, merged or left to die by some bigger fish, and people began to read national stories from national papers.
But it’s difficult to write a story for which the entire country will find interesting. Instead of writing facts, journalists had to write for emotions (things we all share): Fear, excitement, or sympathy. This meant that businesses and individuals with interesting facts to share couldn’t get a wedge in sideways (without the help of a PR who would dress it up).
Now, however, that’s all changing and coming back around thanks to (yup, you guessed it) the internet. People can find their chosen interest online and ignore everything else. They can choose a category, then a sub-category, then a sub-sub-category, or an individual journalist and read only that (with ease).
Furthermore, news outlets online don’t have limits. They aren’t constrained by printing costs or page numbers. On the contrary, more is better, and so now they’re starting to allow anyone to contribute. The more contribution, the more content, the more content, the more traffic (in theory), the more traffic, the more advertising revenues.
This is entirely in our (the business, entrepreneur, individual’s) favour. We, the lonesome warrior sitting at home, can finally share our news again with our local community.
Anyone can contribute to Yahoo! Voices (featured authors get their articles published on the main news site), MSN Social Voices, The Huffington Post, Business Insider, Forbes (almost), BuzzFeed, CNN, Science Daily and more. More outlets will open up soon, it’s just a question of when and how.
- Some news outlets such as The Guardian invite their top commenters to write for them.
