Thursday, September 16, 2004

NNA conference report 2

I did note that Singleton never exactly talked about blogs--everything but. In the next morning session, it was kind of the same way.

Stephen Byers, from the Univ. of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, spoke on "Beyond demographics: Understanding who your readers are and how they communicate." He tackled the very real issue of how to find the communities in a newspaper's audience when people are abandoning traditional communities--the "bowling alone" phenomenon. I was glad to hear that he's not so hot on everything Putnam has to say and that he likes Ray Oldenberg's The Great Good Place.

He talked a lot about finding ways to reach out to discover these invisible communities--for example by hanging out in coffee shops where moms with small children talk about what's important. But he didn't mention engaging with the blgosphere, and nobody else did either.

No comments: