Social 2009

One of the questions all media people are going to be considering in 2009 is how social media will support newsrooms.

Erick Schonfeld in TechCrunch reviews the Top Top Social Media Sites of 2008, with Blogger in the lead and Facebook coming in a close second place. Whatever you make of these numbers social media spaces are clearly places that news organizations can look for an audience.

Meanwhile, over on Mashable Leslie Poston looks at HOW TO: Give Back With Social MicroFunding in 2009.

Social networking in not going to bring in money the way that selling newspapers did. But it might make a growing source of revenue if social networkers can find something they value from newsrooms in their social networks. Like NPR's listening application in Facebook, or newsfeeds that are specifically focused on group topics.

Thinking about spot.us, the Bay Area social news network that allows users to fund reporting, it's hard not to imagine the spot.us idea would do well in a social networking environment.

Spot.us is aiming to gather groups of interested people around a story to fund it. Social networks have already created groups of people who are interested in the same topic. Would a Spot.us application in Facebook find revenue for stories in groups that are interested in those stories?

Obviously we won't know until someone tries it. But perhaps 2009 is the year for news organizations to look into social networks for new revenue streams.