Adventures in media

Thanks to the Internet, the death of the newspaper has been predicted to be imminent for more than a decade.

At Northern Life, we really don't think that's true. There will always be a hunger for community news, for stories that deliver local stories, local faces and local voices. The death-in-everything-but-name of the classified section has arrived thanks to competition from Facebook and Kijiji, but in no way has it dragged the whole of the Good Ship Newspaper down with it.

In fact, the change has made us better, forced us to evolve. And that is a good thing.

With televisions, smartphones and tablet computers, a world of information is just a touch screen away. But folks will still want to know what's going on in their own backyards, and, more often than not, they place their trust in community newspapers to bring it to them.

And we thank you for it. We respect your trust.

But the changing reality of the media landscape in which we — all of us, not just media types like me — find ourselves is undeniable. Mediums are colliding. Newspapers look like magazines, magazines like websites and websites like some Frankenstein version of the latter two.

I sat in on a seminar last week with fellow editors and reporters from papers across the U.S. and Canada (thank you once again, Mr. Internet) in which the presenter flashed a stat on the screen showing that a mere 20 years ago, the average person was viewing 40,000 media images a day on screens and in print.

Today, that same person is seeing 160,000. Yes, competition for your attention is fierce. Competition for your cash is just as fierce and advertisers have more choices than ever when it comes to getting their names into your brain.

I bet your wondering where I'm going with all of this.

Well, all of this competition has made life more challenging and, like I mentioned earlier, it has also made us better. Forced us to adapt.

Let me give you a for instance. Northern Life's printed edition can only bring you the latest news twice a week. That leaves us very little room to tell you about seven days worth of events.

NorthernLife.ca, on the other hand, is daily. It is being updated with new information almost hourly to bring you the latest. To get the very latest of the latest though, thousands of people follow us on Twitter and thousands more interact with us on Facebook.

Yes, media landscape continues to change and, from the way we deliver the news in print and online to the way we package it, it's about to change even more. As I said, mediums are colliding.

In January, NorthernLife.ca began livestreaming news and events on the Internet. We are, in a way, becoming a sort of television station.

Like newspaper editors the world over, I sometimes awake in the dark of the night and wonder just what it is I am exactly. Am I an editor? A webmaster? A TV producer?

The final result of this evolution is still a bit up in the air, but it is an exciting time to be in newspapers. Never before have the various media been more relevant, nor the line which separates us more blurred. And I'm inviting you to come along for the ride and see where this thing takes us.

Over the next several months, we're going to be rolling out a variety of new offerings. And if it really matters, we'll bring it to you live.

But up-to-the-nanosecond live coverage of news (as we did during last week's fatal fire on Elizabeth Street) is only a part of what we will be doing; we have so much more planned — the only limit, really, is bandwidth and our imagination.

I can hardly wait.

Mark Gentili is the managing editor of Northern Life.