Mark Coddington

The future of journalism and new media is fun to talk about in the abstract, but things get a little hairier when we start talking about actual projects tried out at actual news organizations, especially the small, local ones that make up the vast majority of our journalistic ecosystem. So I thought it’d be helpful to survey how one small daily newspaper uses social media to engage with its community and gather and disseminate news.

The easiest paper to do with is, of course, my own — The Grand Island Independent. We’re a 20,000-circulation paper covering a city of 45,000 in the middle of Nebraska, along with 16 rural counties around it. I talked with Stephanie Romanski, our awesome web editor, who has spearheaded bunches of creative uses of the web and social media, including daily Cover it Live chats with readers and a personal voice for the newspaper on Twitter and Facebook. (She writes in more detail about those efforts on her blog, so make sure to check it out.)

Steph and I talked last week for a half hour about those initiatives and others, along with the differences between social media at small news orgs and large ones and tons of Steph’s advice for people jumping into social media at smaller outlets.

Have a listen — Steph’s got some great stuff to share.

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Related posts:

1. To make money from social media, a newspaper plays consultant
2. What Facebook and small-town weeklies have in common: A value for social news