In  the business world, there is a phrase – “Stick to your core competencies.” – that needs some updating in the Web 2.0 world.  The updated phrase should be something to the effect of, “Transfer your core competencies to the web.”

Last night, I attended the WCCO-sponsored Bloginar at Sweeney’s in St. Paul, MN.  (WCCO is our local CBS affiliate.)  While the event was a resounding success in terms of the quality of engagement and interest by participants, I was struck by one point – WCCO is not utilizing its core competencies to a great extent in the Web 2.0 world.  First, I want to defend WCCO and state for the record that it isn’t totally behind the ball.  In fact, it might even be a leader of their field in terms of Web 2.0.  Its tv news personalities do have blogs (example), and their recent hire of John Daenzer as Director of New Media speaks highly of the company’s committment to getting involved in online social media.  Additionally, the company recently unveiled an innovative online advertising service similar to Google’s Adsense that could benefit local bloggers.  And as a final testament to WCCO’s Web 2.0-immersion, I actually learned of the Bloginar event via Twitter, which says a lot about the success the station is having in communicating in that medium.

What the current actions of WCCO (and probably almost every other news station) describe is a lack of understanding of the flatness of Web 2.0 world.  I don’t mean to say that the folks working at WCCO don’t know this, I am only saying that they are not taking enough action to address it.  Put simply, tv news’ one-to-many, personality-driven model of interfacing with the public will likely not work well in the Web 2.0 world.  The world of online social media is a humble one.  It requires the development of new relationships and regular involvement.  While there will certainly be a good revenue stream for personality-driven, one-to-many television communication for the forseeable future, I venture to guess that if WCCO wants to stay ahead of the Web 2.0 curve, it should move towards more of a citizen-journalism model of interacting with its audience online.  A couple of good local examples of citizen journalism here in the Twin Cities include Twin Cities Daily Planet and The Uptake.

So let’s take a look at some of WCCO’s most obvious core competencies:

• Video collection.  WCCO is a video-gathering machine.  It’s success in the tv news medium relies on it getting high-quality video of breaking news.
• Interviews/contacts.  WCCO has an experienced news team with a robust knowledge of the local community and, presumably, valuable interview contacts.
• Website infrastructure.  WCCO already has a robust website that distributes news.

In order for WCCO to become a more valuable member of the Web 2.0 community, I suggest that it leverage the aforementioned core competencies in the following way:

1. Open source all of your raw video footage and place it online for anyone to download.
2. Open source all of your interview notes (quotes from interviewees as well as video interviews) and allow anyone to download them.
3. Provide a way for citizen-journalists to submit mashed-up news stories to you online (a simple upload form will work for this).
4. Take the cream of the crop of the news stories submitted to you and integrate these citizen-journalists’ news coverage into your broadcasts.
5. Allow visitors to your website the ability to view and rate all of the citizen-journalists’ videos.

If WCCO were to jump on this now, they would be part of an elite group that includes NOVA‘s Free Video Archive and the BBC’s Creative Archive as mainstream media providers of broadcast-quality mashupable video.

There is certainly some risk of being a leader in the field of Web 2.0, but the prospective rewards of being among “the first” are also great.  Rewards include $$$, clout in the Web 2.0 world, building of a more innovative culture at WCCO, grabbing more of an audience share, and, perhaps most importantly, better-serving the public.

I intend this post to merely be a starting point for discussion about how tv news media can better serve the public (and their bottom lines) in a Web 2.0 world.  I, myself, am just getting started thinking about this, so I’m sure that there are far more qualified people out there to speak on this topic – I hope those people will share their thoughts below.