The news business is "entering strange, new days" right now, said Elisabeth DeMarse, CEO of the global news-summarizing online publication Newser, during her keynote talk at Real Estate Connect New York City 2012.
However, in the helter-skelter there are a plethora of tools, said DeMarse, that real estate professionals can take advantage of to fully utilize the social-mobile-dominating media age we’re living in.
Tumblr allows you to set up a blog quickly and easily, and applications like TweetDeck and HootSuite allow you to manage, smartly, your mini-publications that are Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, she said.
In the new age of media, said DeMarse, it’s clear that news companies are no longer breaking all of the news, but they are curating it. And the surprising players in the growing online news world are search engines Google and Bing, and ourselves, with search engines and social media as the first filters of curation.
The rise of social media and real-time social media-tracking software like Chart Beat explains why most media outlets are covering the same stories, she said. Some publications, like Gawker, are making a business by re-amplifying their own stories, and others’ hot-topic stories, almost in real time.
As a publisher, tracking where your traffic is coming from is huge, and social media needs to be a growing source, she suggests. "You can declare victory as a publisher if you’re getting 15 percent of your traffic from (social media) sources."
Quality journalism — original, new content, which has become a serious new commodity — is in a battle with the reality of limited advertising revenues and disparate audiences in a "dance of the dinosaurs," said DeMarse. Offline dollars have become digital dimes, and now, possibly mobile pennies, she said.
Quality does win out, though, said DeMarse. It’s just a little confusing right now what that will look like when the dust settles.
