When my sister-in-law was in grad school I proofed a great many papers about collection updates and development, that is weeding through all of the books in the library that have sat on the shelf for years without being checked out and and removing them from circulation and adding new materials to the collection which will mirror the demographics of patrons along with the needs and wants of the community.

Books like Home Computers: A Simple and Informative Guide, which was written in 1980 and hasn’t been checked out since 2000, can be analogies for a great many things, one of them being the way social media is killing traditional journalism.

Social media is everywhere and it’s infiltrating almost every aspect of our daily lives. Not only do we now connect with our family members, friends and business acquaintances through these sites, but connectivity is a major concern for retailers.  Cell phones are now sold based on how easily users can connect to and update social networks and camera manufacturer Kodak has recently rolled out a line of point-and-shoot cameras with a Facebook share feature.

This relates to journalism because social networking is rewriting the rules. New media is doing to traditional print media what librarians like my sister-in-law are doing to out of circulation books: weeding out the outdated and updating content to more closely match what consumers want.

In my market, which is a county of 60,000 people in rural West Tennessee, consumers still want print editions. Because we’re a small community paper, in every issue we run editorial content larger papers like the New York Times would never print. We have photos from the Lions Club and Rotary meetings, photos of Bobby Joe’s fourth birthday party and photos of family reunions. We often write about community events – memorial fish fries, teddy bear clinics and festivals – and other things not considered newsworthy by even our Memphis counterparts.

We don’t have an age group in our target market, but many of our readers are Baby Boomers and older. They faithfully read their hometown newspaper, in its print form, every week. Younger generations have grown up with the Internet and while they’ll read the paper on occasion, especially to clip out their child’s t-ball photo, they prefer to get their news in other fashions. This is the demographic the industry is trying to accommodate; this generation will define the future of journalism.

Dozens of larger dailies have folded because their business model was no longer in sync with their demographic, but smaller papers have held on because our readers still want the community-minded pieces about the high school student who waters plants in town to earn money for college. This is called refrigerator journalism because these are the pieces grandmothers clip out and keep on their refrigerators; refrigerator journalism is what’s saving this country’s community papers.

It’s what’s keeping us afloat, but it won’t completely save us.

We have to save ourselves and the way to do that is to mold our content around the needs of our next generation and use social networks as a means through which to deliver it. It’s not as easy as removing the check-out card and using a Sharpie to black the library’s name out of a book, but it’s not as difficult as it seems.

We have to develop our collection of tools and find the best way to serve our readers.

In March 2009, I created a Facebook page and Twitter profile for the paper and at first we didn’t have many fans. I was under the impression that if you build it, they’d come. But they didn’t. Several months later I wrote a column about our Facebook page and why I believe it to be an essential tool for journalists. This advertisement gained us hundreds of fans, but it wasn’t until we were put to the test that our fanbase grew by leaps and bounds.

Since January, this area has seen it’s share of emergencies – unexpected snowstorms, a playground destroyed to arson, murder-suicide, unprecedented flooding and more – and this is when we have really used social networks to everyone’s advantage. We used Facebook and Twitter to break these stories, pointed our readers to our website and used our print edition to compile these stories and update readers.

When your job is to inform the public, you have to make it convenient for your consumers if you intend to stay in business. Through social networking, we are able to share information as it happens and we’re able to network with our readers. Personalized customer service should be an important component to every business model and the use of social networks by our paper’s writers certainly humanizes the experience.

As is the goal of the library, new media is all about engaging readers in a way that’s never been done before. If we aren’t successful, we’ll likely find ourselves in the stack next to that ragged old ’80s guide to home computing.

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