Newsrooms can’t be everything to everybody, but we can be everywhere.

That is a hard concept to accept for most traditional journalist. The industry is used to pushing information in one direction and holding it close until that point comes.

But if we don’t begin to embrace the need to unbundle content and be on Flickr, YouTube, Digg, Facebook and other such places we risk losing a huge potential audience.

Steve Outing writes about the “profound change” in a blog entry and column for Editor & Publisher. He argues that content can no longer live as an island online pushing people to one place.

News organizations must develop strategies that pump out their content – in bits and pieces – to anyone who’s willing to run it.

As one example, I know in my newsroom I began putting our videos on YouTube about seven months ago.

The original intent at the time was to put video into a better player since Flash at the time wasn’t an option. But what happened is that people actually started subscribing to the video, providing video responses and commenting like crazy.

In other words, we reached a different audience we never had before and did it in the place they already were.

If you media company doesn’t do this encourage them to start now.