It's not new media MSM is failing at: it's social media

In his post on how Local news is changing - but not fast enough, Paul Bradshaw effectively and poignantly pinpoints what mainstream media is struggling to catch up with.

To me, the quote below, is the perefect illustration that this is not new media - to my my mind, new media is just digitalised old media - but social media. And essentially, the latter is not so much about the tools as about the mindset. This is also one of my hobby horses: I believe, as I've said before, that all journalists today work at the intersection of social media and mainstream media (MSM), and these are the skills needed to maneuver this territory successfully (the 'uneven' distribution of these skills, as well as management's failure to grasp how essential these are, is, leaving aside the financial aspect, to a large extent why MSM is struggling online):

...there are hundreds of journalists who need re-educating and training in everything from video and podcasting to social networking, managing databases, and online etiquette.

And they all have newspapers to get out.

Because “Web-first” is still a strategy in publishing only - not in journalism and storytelling. For most journalists - and even more editors - the web is still a ‘channel’, not a place. It’s somewhere to put stuff - that’s why video took off so quickly: it was something everyone could understand. They’d seen it on the telly.

What needs to be made clear is that the internet makes news a service, not a product; that every action of a journalist online - commenting, blogging, networking, twittering, posting to YouTube - is an act of distribution, and because they’re not doing those things, great stories aren’t being read as much as they should, or told as well as they could...