Goes to show, you don’t have to be just a newspaper


Years and years ago, newspapers were just that. Newspapers. There weren’t opportunities to expand into being something else.

Gradually, now, we’re seeing newspapers morphed into being other things — TV stations and daily newspapers. Yeah a weekly newspaper might be scheduled for once a week with its print product but news always happens and using a website or Social Media opportunity, those weekly newspapers can be 24/7 outlets for local readers to find out what’s going on.

A few months ago, we had the story of Jay Nolan and the Mountain Advocate in Barbourville and some of the things they were doing outside of just pirnting a weekly newspaper. And there have been others mentioned, ones that did local high school sports.

Last weekend, checking Facebook I can across a Facebook Live use by the Greenup Beacon. The voice was familiar as I watched a Russell vs. Greenup County High School football game. Listening for a couple of minutes and knowing the intonations of his voice, turns out it was the Beacon publisher Hank Bond himself, telecasting the high school football game as he played out his best on-air personality calling a football game.

He’s been doing these games about five years, using Facebook Live for a few minutes each game but livestreaming entire games, both home and away.

Hank sent me three examples of what he and the staff are doing, including the game I caught part of last weekend and his weekly news magazine show.

https://youtu.be/VQi_P18NpZ4 is the link for the game you reference

http://www.greenupbeacon.com/live_streaming__archives is our bank of archives of events

http://www.greenupbeacon.com/video_news_magazine is our weekly news magazine

 

The message here is — it’s okay to use all the resources you can. Don’t settle on just putting out a printed product once a week or someone will come into the community and start doing those other things for you. Reach out to other news media about what they’re doing, how they’re doing it, what the results are, what the challenges are, what equipment it takes. Then give it a try. Maybe it’s a man on the street interview on a local hot topic. Maybe it’s a news magazine type show, sitting down and interviewing someone “on air” as such. Maybe it’s covering a major news event “live” or maybe it’s just making sure if something happens right after the paper comes off the press, your readers won’t have to wait a week to find out about that news event.

 

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