As television stations around the country look for ways to cut costs in the face of dwindling revenue, increased operating expenses, and economic turmoil, many have already dramatically reduced the staff alloted to, or even entirely eliminated, their community affairs departments. Now, with the future viability of local media often called into question, you can sense the fear in the halls of most broadcast companies. Change has come to our industry. Make no mistake. But this is a time for your community affairs department to be leaders of that change not its victims.

1. Admit you’re really part of the marketing department.

Community affairs departments were created years ago to reinforce a marketing message of community service. That message was especially important in an industry that relies upon the FCC licensed use of public airwaves. But now, thanks to deregulation and the proliferation of new distribution models, broadcast companies decreasingly see themselves as beholden to the public as such. Consequently, the message you were initially called to propagate has too, overtime, become less valuable. But if you can embrace marketing as what you’ve been called on to do all along, you’ll find marketing has changed, and that you’re perhaps the best suited department in your station for the challenges of new marketing. You see, new marketing isn’t about massive media buys. It isn’t about bombarding as many people as you can with a branded commodity’s advertising. Simply put, new marketing isn’t about broadcasting. But what new marketing is about is engaging consumers in discourse. It’s about seeking out your customers where they are to engage them instead of waiting for them to engage you. It’s about the niche. It’s about building communities, and, if you’re good, new marketing is about starting movements.

2. Get back to your grassroots. Start some movements.

I’m willing to bet that at least some of you reading this found yourself attracted to this field because of a desire to help others, to be a part of something larger than yourself, a part of a movement. But somewhere along the way you found you were going to meetings. You were dealing with human resource issues. And you were struggling to make budget. But you weren’t building communities, and you certainly weren’t leading any movements. Well, now is the time to get back to your roots, your grassroots. You need to be discovering your station’s content niches, fostering any community that may already have grown up around them and then leading your station’s engagement with these communities. What can you do to give a community voice? How can you help build that community? Grow it? How can you help shape that community into a movement? Thanks to the Internet, now, more than ever, the tools to enable communication within a movement are readily available, but don’t wait for your station’s Web department to fit you into their schedule. They’re too busy posting news content and creating display ads. Instead, seek out the ever-increasing number of free online tools you can use to build and extend communities. In addition to the more popular tools like blogging, Facebook, Flickr and Twitter, try setting up your own social network on PeopleAggregator or Ning.

3. Earn revenue by offering niche sponsorship opportunities.

You may already be earning revenue through corporate sponsorships of a handful of seemingly philanthropic programs. Those sponsorships usually boil down to a logo and a voice-over credit at the tail end of a promo. The problem with this, though, is two-fold. First, as an economy wanes, campaigns of these sorts are often the first cut by advertisers. Second, and more pointedly, as ratings decline in the face of alternative distribution models, these paid sponsorships are of decreasing value to clients, and thus, will be increasingly difficult for your sales team to secure. You won’t be able to find a few sponsors that underwrite most of your department’s budget through large sponsorship deals. Instead, you’ll need to find a greater number of advertisers willing to support your station’s niche communities. Ultimately, this is better for advertisers because the barrier to entry, namely cost, is significantly lower, and it allows them to better target niche audiences which are more likely to respond to their marketing efforts.

4. Build communities and movements within your station.

We’re often so focused on our users, viewers or listeners that we easily forget our stations themselves are made up of individuals who want and need to be social, to be a part of a community, a part of a movement. Look for opportunities to be leaders of change in your very own building. Do you have a station effort to help your staff be more green? Could you start one and impassion others around the effort? What about identifying your station’s early adopters and tapping their expertise to discover emerging technologies, applications and platforms that could benefit your operation and then implementing some of those discoveries? Find ways to start conversations about change within your station and to enable voices who otherwise might not have been heard. If your station isn’t using Yammer, which is a Twitter-like tool for communication within the enterprise, it should be. In lieu of that, start an email list to reach out and foster discussion around areas of change. But don’t let your efforts stall in those discussions. Look for key actionable ideas and then lead the execution of those ideas. Start some movements.

5. Become your station’s social media experts.

Every department in your building is or is beginning to realize just how much the game has changed. The old tools aren’t working as well as they used to and social media is beginning to pervade almost every sales, promotions, and news effort. Your promotions department will want to know about using social media for marketing your station’s efforts, to reach your audience where they are. Your news department will have questions about using Twitter or Facebook to find sources, cover breaking news. Help train reporters to use their smart phones and social media to increase transparency and expose their process. Work with your sales department on campaigns that leverage your station’s existing communities to extend your client’s marketing message. In short, be the go to people for social media.

We often talk about dead-end jobs, those jobs that offer no hope for advancement, but if you work for a company with the right kind of culture, then none of the positions there are necessarily dead-ends. At a dead-end company, however, all of the jobs are dead-ends too. Just what is a dead-end company? How do you know if your company is really just a dead-end? Below, I’ve listed a handful of traits that I think to be indicative of a dead-end company. Use the comment form to add yours.

Dead-end companies…

have lots of managers, but not many leaders.
In Tribes, Seth Godin, draws out a wonderful distinction between managers and leaders. Managers, Seth tells us, are listened to because employees who don’t listen to their managers are fired. Leaders are listened to because they inspire passion in people, passion to get behind great ideas. Managers are paid to ensure a certain set of well-established tasks are completed in a timely fashion. Leaders are looking for new ways to accomplish new goals. Managers are there to maintain the status quo. Leaders are there to change it. The reality is that the status quo isn’t working any more; the reality is that business needs fewer managers and more leaders.

don’t seek input from the lower ranks.
Leaders needn’t come from the top floor. In fact, it’s not even really fair to expect a small group of managers to generate all of the ideas and vision needed to carry a company through the changing landscape. But dead-end companies don’t know that. Dead-end companies are filled with managers who have become adept at not knowing what it is they don’t know. Instead of empowering conversation within the organization and enabling more voices and ideas, they are Social Darwinists, convinced by their positions that those below them can’t possibly generate the great ideas that will carry their company forward.

pay the highest salaries to those stuck on status quo.
Let’s face it. Salary is a company’s valuation of the work you do. While salaries are generally not common knowledge, it’s usually not difficult to estimate where your colleagues fall within the pay scale. Take a look at the salary structure. What does your company value? If the old guard — those resisting change, who dismiss new ways of doing things, new ideas and new tools — are the highest paid employees in your organization, then the status quo is what’s most valued. And the status quo isn’t in need of leaders. After all, the status quo means going nowhere, and you don’t need any leaders if you’re just staying put.

are busy developing five and ten year plans.
You know what didn’t exist five years ago? Here’s a just a few: YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, Flickr, and Digg. Ten years ago there weren’t any hybrid cars. Ten years ago, Google wasn’t a part of our daily lives. Have these tools changed how business is done? You bet. And who knows what tools will emerge in the next five or ten years. Trying to see that far down the road with a rigid corporate plan is a good sign of a company that’s remained oblivious to the changing world around them. What will you be doing in five years? You probably won’t be doing what you’re doing today, and you certainly won’t be doing it the same way.

don’t see how social media has changed their business.
The Internet, or social media in particular, has empowered consumers like never before. Tools like Facebook, YouTube and Twitter have given everyone of your customers their own little soap box from which they can praise your product or let everyone in their social network know just how bad they think it is. The wonderful thing about this for business is that we can seek out our customers on these platforms and engage them in conversation. Dead-end companies simply wait by the phone or occassionally check their inboxes.

1. Forget about your Twitter ROI (for now)

Your tweets won’t generate revenue. Most likely, you won’t see your site’s page views increase. Circulation most assuredly won’t increase, and there won’t be any spike in viewers during the next book. So why do it? Simply put, Twitter affords us an opportunity to begin a culture shift within our organizations. Being a part of a community or hoping to build a community is hard work, and it’s work many of us don’t know how to even begin undertaking. Twitter, though, has lowered the bar for entry. Our staff members can begin by just answering that one little question. Twitter can serve as a tutor for our newsrooms. It can help us begin to see and begin to be a part of content creation as a community driven effort.

2. Twitter isn’t a broadcast channel

To many, Twitter’s 140 character envelope seems ready made for broadcasting our headlines, breaking news and promotions; however, using Twitter as though it were a one-way medium like our papers or newscasts ignores what has made social media so compelling: It has made content creators and publishers of us all. And that content flows in all directions, not just from our newsrooms. When a group of twitterers, who share the same niche or hyperpersonal connection, twitter to and follow one another’s tweets, the conversation grows beyond the confines of “What are you doing?” Meaning is generated via the discourse of that community, and that’s the key.

3. Climb down off that pedestal

We’ve been the gatekeepers of news and information for so long, it’s easy to think of ourselves as the experts, the professionals in the know. Now, as the gathering and reporting of news becomes an increasingly communitized part of our society, that you’re from the local daily or TV news team doesn’t afford you as much credibility as you might think. In fact, in established communities, you can be seen as a social media carpetbagger. Approach Twitter communities knowing that your value in the conversation has yet to be determined. You need to begin joining those communities and establishing the validity of your contributions therein. Increasingly, its the power of your voice within communities that will be the value you leverage, not your signal strength.

4. Don’t rely upon a single branded Twitter presence

A single unified voice for your newsroom is counterproductive in social media. It’s a space that rewards bringing more voices to the conversation, not solidifying them behind a single, faceless edifice. After all, social media is really all about connecting individuals to other individuals. And you needn’t worry about departing staff splintering your community, because it’s not really your community to begin with. Efforts to fight this, to remain monolithic, to deny individuals within your newsroom their own voice on Twitter or elsewhere, in the long run, will only serve to diminish your newsroom’s value within these communities.

5. Find your twitterers and their niches

If you don’t have a local political reporter or blogger, don’t try to force yourself into the space just because it’s an election year. Instead, start with what you do have. Start with your impassioned reporters covering specific beats or your bloggers writing about a particular niche. Have them tweet about their beat or niche and encourage them to stay on topic. If you have an education reporter who suddenly begins tweeting movie reviews, he’s fracturing his voice and undermining his own value to a community of users who are following him for his education tweets.

6. Help your twitterers take ownership of their efforts

Show your twitterers how they can customize the layout of their Twitter profile pages. Provide them with any brand elements you would like them to include, like logos or photos for backgrounds. Make sure they have a custom avatar and that, especially once they’ve started to gain followers, they don’t change it. That avatar acts a flag in twitter time line that lets users quickly focus on a user’s tweets. But in the end, don’t make them robot-like extensions of your brand, couching tweets within catch phrases from your marketing consultants. Let them craft their own online personae.

7. Make tweeting easy

Make it easy for your twitterers to remain engaged in their Twitter communities. Make sure they can and do twitter from their mobile phones, whether that’s via text message or a dedicated application like TwitterBerry for the Blackberry or Twitterific on the iPhone. Install a Twitter client on their desktops or notebooks, and show them how to use it. An application like Digsby is a great way for your twitterers to tie their Facebook, instant messaging, Twitter, and email accounts together into one tool that sits in their system trays. If you’re not on Windows, or you have computers that can’t handle the sometimes resource intensive Digsby, try out Twhirl, an application running on Adobe’s Air platform. It’s a much lighter weight client that can also be set up to run at login. Help them make Twitter a part of their day and it will grow beyond the confines of work hours as they become increasingly involved in their Twitter communities.

8. Gaining followers that count

In an industry that measures success in ratings and subscription numbers, you can easily feel a sense of urgency to grow your followers. You can gain a large number of followers by yourself following as many people as you can, as many still consider it simply polite to follow someone who is following them. The problem is that the more people you follow, the less useful Twitter is. In fact, once you’re following hundreds of other twitterers, the model breaks down. Your community and its conversations quickly become garbled noise. Instead, use search.twitter.com to find others tweeting about the same niche or hyperpersonal connection. Follow their tweets and start posting thoughtful replies. When you tweet, build in a request for replies. Ask your followers what they think. Begin to build your own Twitter conversations, hoping to create meaning via that discourse. Your numbers will grow, but by taking the time to do it via community interaction, the followers you gain will be a higher quality lot.

9. Use a separate account to push headlines

If you must broadcast your headlines, set up a specific Twitter account for just that purpose. Those that follow you will do so knowing that’s exactly what they’re in for. It becomes another means of news consumption for a user, a sort of RSS feed, if you will. But don’t push all of your content through Twitter. Instead, set up a separate feed of selected stories you want to go to Twitter, cherry picking the content most likely to grab your followers’ attention. Too, don’t only rely upon automated tools to bring news into your Twitter stream. Often, the way we craft headlines makes sense within the context of our websites, but can be rethought to be more Twitter friendly and, let’s face it, more compelling.

10. Now what?

Remember that you needn’t always be at the center of the community. How can you use your existing website to foster community building, to help connect people in your demo on Twitter? Twitter moms, for instance, is a site for moms who tweet, but its real appeal doesn’t lie in its ability to simply connect tweeting moms, a niche, but that these moms can use the site to move beyond the niche to find other single mothers or mothers with special needs children, the niches within the niche that engage a consumer’s “I am.” Take the next step by facilitating the expansion of Twitter communities beyond the niche and into the hyperpersonal.

I recently sat in the offices of a small paper, talking with the firm’s principles about the direction of their website. I was disheartened to hear some of the room’s decision makers say they should be holding back their best content from the Web. After all, they believed, if they put all of their content online, no one would bother to read their publication. I’ve heard similar arguments in television newsrooms, where the fear isn’t so much in undercutting their efforts as it is not wanting to tip their hand to the competition before they’ve had a chance to break a story on air. These are lines of reasoning that make sense to many print and broadcast professionals,  but whether they realize it or not, we’ve moved to a time where all news media outlets need to be, first and foremost, Web publishers.

According to an early 2008 survey by Zogby International, almost half of the respondents said the Internet was their primary source for news. What’s more, that was an eight percent increase from a similar survey just one year earlier. If we want to extrapolate that out a bit more dramatically, we could say that in a single year, nearly a tenth of the American population moved from television, radio and newspapers to the Internet as the place to which they first turn for information. That trend is not about to reverse. What percentage of readers and viewers must first turn to the Web before its seen as the place to break a story? Will another eight percent jump in 2009 allow a publication to see its website as not competing with the primary interest but instead as the primary interest?

Regardless of the current revenue split between online and offline ad sales, it’s an ever weighted scale, whose balance continues to shift towards the Web. The current revenue model won’t persist. The only question for traditional media is whether those dollars move to their sites or someone else’s. And in a time of blogger journalists and increasing aggregation, where I can find much of the same content on any number of sites, the competition is no longer limited to another daily or the TV station across town.

Warner Brothers Chairman Barry M. Meyer told the New York Times he believes that, despite the recent focus on new methods of content distribution, eventually “… distribution gets commoditized.” Warner Brothers, he said, will continue to focus on content creation. After all, “at the end of it all, it’s just a blank screen.” This is the time that news media must be converting readers, listeners and viewers into users, their website’s users. You do that by focusing on the content you’re creating, not on the method of distribution.

Will television go away? No, though its mode of delivery will change. People will still buy and read magazines and newspapers. There will still be some place for radio, too. And the Web as it is today will give way to some other incarnation. But, in the end, they’re all just methods of increasingly commoditized distribution. Focus, instead, on filling those blank screens. Your consumers want content, and, for now, there’s an almost 50 percent chance they’ll first look to your website. But if they don’t find what they’re looking for, they’ll look elsewhere. More often than not, they won’t bother returning to your site to see if you’ve gotten your act together.

As newsrooms take their first steps into social media, as they work to extend their citizen journalism efforts and as notions of community begin to be a part of our internal conversations, it feels to many as though we embark blindly, with only our best guesses to guide us. And, to be sure, we don’t know precisely what form our industry will take going forward, what methods for news gathering and reporting have yet to be forged, or what roles many of us will play as the stage shifts beneath our feet. And yet, I feel confident in saying that what we’re moving towards could be called the communitization of news– that is, a model of journalism by which communities of voices, that need not be attached to any traditional news organization, are responsible in large part for the collection and dissemination of news.

How do we know this transition is upon us, that journalism will be wrested from our hands and that it could be placed into the care of anyone with time enough to put up a blog or start a Twitter account? The answer is simply that, if we can’t already see it in our own industry (though it should be plain enough), we can certainly see it in others. More than a decade ago, in his ‘The Cathedral and the Bazaar,’ Eric Raymond noted the shift beginning in the software industry as a model we now call open source. More recently, Simon Phipps, Sun Microsystems’ chief open source officer, sees that shift as beginning to permeate all of society.

Pre-World Wide Web, most things that happened in the world were done on a hub-and-spoke basis where you’d have, for example, government in the middle and citizens on the end of the spokes. Or, you’d have industry in the middle and customers on the end of the spokes. I think the introduction of the World Wide Web has changed the basic topology of society from hub-and-spoke to mesh.

It’s not difficult to see our newsrooms as these hubs, passing out bits information to the spokes, our consumers, when we see fit and in a manner we deem best. And we’ve enjoyed our time as gatekeepers, with little or no competition, especially for local news, where few cities support more than one daily and FCC licensing has kept the number of television and radio players in any single market relatively low. But now the Internet has allowed our readers and viewers to connect to each other and share news and information with one another in ways never before possible. And that’s exactly what they’re doing. They’re forming a mesh of blogs, YouTube videos and tweets that circumnavigates the hubs of traditional journalism. They’re communitizing the collection and dissemination of news.

The mistake would be in clinging to our hubs, holding to a model quickly giving way, forcing it onto the Web. Trying to build your own social networking, video sharing or micro-blogging site, unless you have a really good reason to do so, isn’t the answer either. That’s really just hoping to reassert yourself as hub. These things already exist and have active communities. You needn’t start from scratch trying to build a community. Google, after all, didn’t buy YouTube because it couldn’t replicate YouTube’s technology. They bought it for its users, because trying to build a large scale community isn’t easy. Instead, we must first enter existing communities ourselves, lending our voices to the already ongoing conversations.

Start by posting quality comments on relevant blog posts, YouTube videos, and Flickr photos. Reply to local tweets on Twitter. Keep in mind, too, that, depending upon the community, you might need to spend some time building equity in your online voice, becoming a valued part of that community, before you publish. And the key, once you do publish, is to avoid treating these platforms as broadcast tools through which you simply re-purpose existing content. If all you’re doing on Twitter is using a tool like twitterfeed to push your headlines through as tweets, then you’re missing the point. On your own site, make sure you’re aggregating outside local content. Let the sites know you’re doing it, that you’re pushing traffic to them, because you see the value of what they’re doing.

In the end, that you’re a reporter, news director or webmaster with the leading station or paper in your market gives you limited initial influence. In many respects, we’re new to the Internet-as-mesh and will have to establish the validity of our contributions, just like everyone else.

There are a number of voices asserting that the saving grace for local news will be a transition from the merely local to the hyperlocal. In its most intriguing form, hyperlocal journalism calls for embedded reporters in a market’s key neighborhoods. The idea is that this will allow an organization to cover those stories that most often go unreported. Neighborhood reporters could attend the PTA meetings, the high school sporting events, neighborhood organizations, town council meetings, craft shows, and even, I suppose, block parties.

Of course, a presupposition of a hyperlocal model assumes the Web as publishing platform. After all, this volume of limited appeal news lends itself only to the limitless expressions of the Internet. You can’t stack a 30 minute show with PTA meetings, and there just isn’t enough room in any city’s daily for a story about every craft show. Even if you could, you wouldn’t. The mass appeal just isn’t there. But, of course, hyperlocal journalism isn’t at all about mass appeal. It’s about the Long Tail. The niche audiences that stretch out across the bottom of your Web stats graph, that, taken together, may very well bring you more eyeballs than your mainstream content. At least, that’s the plan.

The problem with hyperlocal news gathering, though, is that it fails to focus on what really drives consumption of the product. Beyond the thrill of spectacle, the crime, accident and fire stories, celebrity gossip or the just plain bizarre, are those stories that are interesting to the consumer because they address an aspect of his life that has lent towards a definition of self. Just because a story is hyperlocal to a reader or viewer, just because a story covers the PTA meeting held in his next door neighbor’s living room, doesn’t mean he’ll find it interesting; and yet, a school administrator in another state whose own district is struggling with some of the same issues covered in a PTA story would most likely find the content compelling.

A hyperpersonal story isn’t at all locale dependent, though locale can certainly be a contributing factor in giving a story hyperpersonal appeal. And that’s the challenge before the evolving local newsroom: To find those local niches that can generate hyperpersonal content. If this sounds a lot like beat reporting, that’s because it is. But where you might currently have an education beat, hyperpersonal journalism calls for the category to be explored for niches within the niche. That doesn’t mean a beat for each school district within your demo. That would still be hyperlocal coverage. It rather means exploring education for those viable sub-niches that engage the consumer’s “I am.” Consumer expressions like “I am a member of the marching band,” “I am the parent of a high school football player,” or “I am a teacher” allow us to quickly see how the education beat can be extrapolated into the hyperpersonal.

Of course, local media outlets don’t have the staff for hyperpersonal journalism. It wouldn’t be fiscally feasible to even attempt it on anything but the smallest scale with inhouse talent anyway. Instead, embracing a hyperpersonal model means searching out other voices in your market to begin contributing to the news conversation. Start by identifying a space that your competition isn’t in. Find those who are already blogging the niches within the niche or those who at least have the interest and drive to begin contributing content. Then provide them with a platform to not only publish their content, either directly or through aggregation, but to form communities with others who share the same hyperpersonal connections.

Going forward, those news organizations that become facilitators of the conversation instead of its gatekeepers are most likely to have a continued voice in it.