By Michael Raine
Have you heard of “new media?”
Beyond web pages, there is Facebook, Twitter, live blogs and a myriad other places online where people can get information and also find a place for their own voices.
The interactive portion of this is the most important part of successful new media channels, along with delivering real information.
After successfully delivering the news for more than 90 years, The Western Producer is a captain of traditional media. Our founding fathers and mothers decided early on that letters to the editor — what we call Open Forum — were a critical link to readers.
Read Also
Agriculture needs to prepare for government spending cuts
As government makes necessary cuts to spending, what can be reduced or restructured in the budgets for agriculture?
At the WP, those letters aren’t to the editor. You write them to each other, and it is a high traffic part of our paper.
On producer.com, readers comment on stories. Last week, some of you began voicing your concerns about a Ducks’ Unlimited radio ad that blamed flooding on agricultural drainage.
Our Brandon reporter, Robert Arnason, noticed farmers using the new media tool Twitter to reach one another about the issue. It led him to write a story about the backlash from producers.
Shortly after that, Ducks Unlimited contacted him and he was able to add its voice to the story.
We’ve run the story on producer.com, and you will read about it in our newspaper this week. Our editors have been accumulating readers’ comments on our feeds at Twitter and Facebook and adding them to the online story.
Thousands of you read it in the first day and began following and commenting on the issue.
We also started a live blog that accumulates even more material, including photographs and stories from our coverage of the spring flooding events.
In short, we and you are doing what we’ve always done, communicating the real news, creating an open forum for discussion and sharing what we know.
Producer.com has been around since 1995 and we began posting reader comments right from the start, so I guess all of this makes us new, again, just like we were in 1923.
