As television stations around the country look for ways to cut costs in the face of dwindling revenue, increased operating expenses, and economic turmoil, many have already dramatically reduced the staff alloted to, or even entirely eliminated, their community affairs departments. Now, with the future viability of local media often called into question, you can sense the fear in the halls of most broadcast companies. Change has come to our industry. Make no mistake. But this is a time for your community affairs department to be leaders of that change not its victims.

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We often talk about dead-end jobs, those jobs that offer no hope for advancement, but if you work for a company with the right kind of culture, then none of the positions there are necessarily dead-ends. At a dead-end company, however, all of the jobs are dead-ends too. Just what is a dead-end company? How do you know if your company is really just a dead-end? Below, I’ve listed a handful of traits that I think to be indicative of a dead-end company. Use the comment form to add yours.

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As more and more local newsrooms embrace social media as marketing and distribution channels, it becomes increasingly easier to catalog our missteps into the space. Microblogging site Twitter, in particular, has been susceptible to misuses by our industry. Lost Remote pointed out Chron.com’s poor use of Twitter in pushing truncated headlines during Hurricane Gustav, and a Colorado newspaper’s decision to twitter a three-year-old boy’s funeral garnered them a number of slaps on the wrist from even the national press. While there are bound to be some of these missteps, they’re far from unavoidable. To that end, I’ve tried to outline some basic concepts and concrete steps that will help your newsroom better leverage its Twitter presence and, hopefully, without repeating some of the mistakes of our colleagues.

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I recently sat in the offices of a small paper, talking with the firm’s principles about the direction of their website. I was disheartened to hear some of the room’s decision makers say they should be holding back their best content from the Web. After all, they believed, if they put all of their content online, no one would bother to read their publication. I’ve heard similar arguments in television newsrooms, where the fear isn’t so much in undercutting their efforts as it is not wanting to tip their hand to the competition before they’ve had a chance to break a story on air. These are lines of reasoning that make sense to many print and broadcast professionals,  but whether they realize it or not, we’ve moved to a time where all news media outlets need to be, first and foremost, Web publishers.

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As newsrooms take their first steps into social media, as they work to extend their citizen journalism efforts and as notions of community begin to be a part of our internal conversations, it feels to many as though we embark blindly, with only our best guesses to guide us. And, to be sure, we don’t know precisely what form our industry will take going forward, what methods for news gathering and reporting have yet to be forged, or what roles many of us will play as the stage shifts beneath our feet. And yet, I feel confident in saying that what we’re moving towards could be called the communitization of news– that is, a model of journalism by which communities of voices, that need not be attached to any traditional news organization, are responsible in large part for the collection and dissemination of news.

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There are a number of voices asserting that the saving grace for local news will be a transition from the merely local to the hyperlocal. In its most intriguing form, hyperlocal journalism calls for embedded reporters in a market’s key neighborhoods. The idea is that this will allow an organization to cover those stories that most often go unreported. Neighborhood reporters could attend the PTA meetings, the high school sporting events, neighborhood organizations, town council meetings, craft shows, and even, I suppose, block parties.

Of course, a presupposition of a hyperlocal model assumes the Web as publishing platform. After all, this volume of limited appeal news lends itself only to the limitless expressions of the Internet. You can’t stack a 30 minute show with PTA meetings, and there just isn’t enough room in any city’s daily for a story about every craft show. Even if you could, you wouldn’t. The mass appeal just isn’t there. But, of course, hyperlocal journalism isn’t at all about mass appeal. It’s about the Long Tail. The niche audiences that stretch out across the bottom of your Web stats graph, that, taken together, may very well bring you more eyeballs than your mainstream content. At least, that’s the plan.

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