Fantasy sports reaches new heights

Misericordia supports United Way food drive

First Posted: 3/25/2014 In the olden days, we&#8217;d produce a newspaper and expect our audience to find us. In the more recent past, we&#8217;ve produced a website and expected our audience to find us.
And many newsrooms are still run under that assumption: If we build it, they will come.
That&#8217;s problematic for audiences most news organizations tend to overlook: Generation Y-ers and the so-called Millennials &#8212; essentially, anyone born after 1980.
As someone who falls into that category, I see that truism play out every day. Adults my age and younger don&#8217;t pick up a newspaper or go to newspaper websites as regularly as our parents and grandparents. We expect the news to find us, even when we&#8217;re on the go.
That cultural shift really changes the way we do business within The Times Leader&#8217;s newsroom. While it&#8217;s so much easier to expect people to come to us, we know we have to put in the work and go where our readers are.
The good news is our readers are responding. Our mobile app usage is up, the number of readers consuming our journalism via smartphones and tablets is way up, and we&#8217;re seeing huge spikes in readership of our journalism via Facebook and Twitter.
The quick fragmentation of how our news report is distributed is maddening. But the steps we&#8217;re taking now are setting the stage for our future.
By emphasizing Facebook growth, we&#8217;re finding new readers. In fact, Facebook is the biggest referrer of traffic to timesleader.com. By tweeting, retweeting and hashtagging our journalism on Twitter, we are reaching younger readers who otherwise wouldn&#8217;t interact with our journalism.
When our reporters and photographers go to the scene of breaking news, they immediately post updates at timesleader.com. Now, our photographers take the extra step of posting photo galleries on our Facebook page. The results are immediate: Readers are sharing our photos, which means our journalism appears on the news feeds of people who wouldn&#8217;t otherwise see it. When our story links are shared on Facebook, friends of whomever shares it now have a chance to interact with our journalism.
That has a snowball effect: When people read one of our stories or click on one of our photos, they tend to &#8220;like&#8221; our Facebook page. In six months, we&#8217;ve grown our Facebook audience from 7,000 to more than 11,500.
This shift changes how we operate. Opinion Editor Mark Jones, who leads perhaps the most traditional part of our newspaper &#8212; the editorial page &#8212; regularly posts our editorials in advance online. He&#8217;ll share a link on Facebook, where readers opine before it prints in the paper. (Some responses are more succinct than others. A recent post asking if state lawmakers should be allowed to accept cash gifts so long as they disclose it was met with three immediate responses: &#8220;No no no,&#8221; &#8220;No, nothing at all&#8221; and a resounding &#8220;HELL NO!!&#8221;
Silly as it seems, those interactions make me smile. It means we&#8217;re doing something right: We&#8217;re where our audience expects us to be.

COMMENTARY: GEORGE SPOHR Why we’re all atwitter about social media