MANY of the PR professionals who read allmediascotland.com will know all about SlideShare – the online site where you can embed presentations to be shared online. It’s a great tool and can help open doors after speaking events, for examples, as the more switched-on speakers now share their slides.
But what about uploading a newspaper to it?
It’s being done in Indonesia, for instance.
Now, with each copy pulling in around 3,000 readers, we’re hardly talking about a revolution, but as with PDFs or JPGs of front pages, there might be something in this as a teaser.
Imagine the BBC highlighting what the papers say, not with a front page but a copy of the whole newspaper?
Imagine getting to a paywall site and having the option of a quick scan of that day’s paper before buying an edition.
Imagine being able to do a presentation and having it freshly embedded with up-to-date news?
There’s no one way that being on SlideShare alone is going to save a newspaper, but the point is this: we live in an age of fragmented media. A decade ago, it was much simpler. The most obvious recent new points of contact for the Press are the web, Twitter, YouTube and Facebook. Some have been quite good at using LinkedIn, FourSquare, Yelp and TripAdvisor too. Then there’s the like of Wiki. All of which brings with it SEO benefits if done properly.
So is SlideShare the saviour of Scottish print media? No (and to be honest, it’s about time we stopped talking in such simplistic terms).
But it could be another ‘puff of wind in the lifejacket’ keeping it afloat.
Craig McGill has written for – or been a member of staff at – TIME Magazine, The Guardian, Daily Mirror, The Scotsman, Evening Times, The Press and Journal, The Sun and Evening Times. Author of four non-fiction books and lecturer in ‘cross-platform journalism’ at Edinburgh Napier University, McGill is currently the digital strategist (Scotland, Ireland and Northern Ireland) for Weber Shandwick. You can get him via Twitter @craigmcgill
