Mainstream news media run the risk of being ignored to death.

They are shrinking not because they are no longer profitable, but because they are adapting to new technologies and the internet so tentatively while ignoring the basics. And readers are finding them less and less relevant as new media sites mature.

They see themselves as newspapers with a website, not a web/print news outlet. Or they choose scandal and sensationalism over depth and understanding as a way to attract higher ratings. Worse yet, they scale back their offerings to maximize their advertising revenue. Meaning less hard news for viewers like me.

In contrast, PBS’s website gets over 200 million page views per month precisely because they have chosen a different path. PBS opts for depth – creating comprehensive web pages linking to digital versions of (text/video/audio) historical documents, and providing background for the issues they cover on television.

Corporate journalism desperately needs to regain its currency and its self-respect. No democracy can survive without an informed electorate. News outlets need to fulfill their responsibility by bettering the quality of their product, and by using new technologies in a smarter and more considered way.

Blogs have evolved from online diaries into an indispensable and multi-varied web format. Blogs are perspectival; seeing the world through the likes and dislikes of the author, and form affinity groups around a subject. Readers expect to have some way to interact on a blog. They don’t expect objectivity as much as they do a personal voice.

More news outlets should consider having a high-profile journalist be their point person on a select subject, giving them the resources and support to moderate and maintain a living, growing home for their topic. Someone who has demonstrable mastery of their subject. Think Juan Cole curating/moderating a multi-media, multi-author blog solely focused on the Middle East with video updates broadcast on CNN.

News orgs should be creating issue-based websites – reporting all there is to report about Sudanese pirates, or Swine flu or health care reform. Let it become a continuously growing storehouse of information, moderated by a demonstrable, and universally recognized expert, or group of objective experts who are more concerned with accuracy than spin. Give it maps and interviews (audio and video), graphs and archives. Have the same host synopsize the same information in traditional media outlets, and give it some attention.

Too often media outlets are using new technologies in either a “me too” way, or in ways that don’t make sense. I don’t want to read about reality stars on a news page. To me, it’s off topic, not synergistic.

As I write this post, the Iranian post-election drama is rapidly playing itself out. Twitter’s #iranelection is for now the g0-to place to find out what is happening inside the country from a first person perspective. The Huffington Post is also doing a decent* job of covering events by setting up a blog page with frequent updates, but you can’t beat the immediacy and unfiltered quality of hundreds of tweets directly from residents of Tehran.

Part of what makes Twitter as a media form so vibrant is a user’s ability to simultaneously and organically create hash tags, like #iranelection as a way of tagging a post. As more and more people adopt the same tag to discuss a subject, a community forms. To me, it feels like getting SMS messages aggregated into RSS feeds grouped automatically by subject.

Another example of the power of social media comes from Josh Micah Marshall’s Talking Points Memo. During the Bush Administration, the government often did document dumps of potentially embarassing information on a Friday night, which meant that a working journalist had to either sacrifice their weekend to wade through reams of paper, or wait until Monday to start making sense of it.

As a way to combat this tactic, TPM has at various times asked its loyal readership on a Friday night to help then comb through a huge amount of information. Readers have responded enthusiastically, filling the blog’s comments section with thousands of posts offering excerpts and page numbers from the documents in question.

For a small operation, having an instant volunteer research team  saves an immesurable amount of time and money, and as a consequence, TPM has been able to digest huge amounts of info and formulate a coherent story about the contents far earlier than any corporate media outlet.

In the past few days, another hashtag, #cnnfail has been popping up quite a bit on Twitter in relation to their coverage of the Iranian elections. Though this may just be a perception, people interested in this topic felt that CNN’s coverage fell short, in part by not covering events fast enough. There is an inherent danger to adopting a technology but then using it badly.

Don’t misuse your media:

• Tweets are great for quick alerts and can be used to give recievers a link to a just-published article.
• Blogs themselves are better suited to the drip, drip, drip of an unfolding story, as long as viewers can easily search through past articles (use tags!). Having a strong narrative voice in posts, making sense of the various threads of an issue, is also highly important.
• Blog comment sections, when focused, can be a great way to track and coordinate collaborative efforts. Excellent way to fact-check.
• Web galleries are essential for articles about visually interesting subjects. Having a text-only report about a new architectural wonder or fluorescent monkey is inexcusable.

*Where the Huffington Post Iran blog falls short is by not having a persistent sidebar with pictures, a concise history of Iran and the government’s structure or even a link to Wikipedia. As time passes, this page will just become another overwhelmingly long and unreadable document.