Let’s not forget what was killing us before the Internet
By William M. Hartnett on May 19, 2008 in featured, newspapers
The question of whether even journalists still read ink-on-paper newspapers, as posed by Robert Niles last week, was interestingly timed, given a conversation I recently had with my brother.
Both he and my sister-in-law were, until three or four years ago, daily newspaper reporters in a top-50 market. They’re in their early 30s, and between them they hold four college degrees, two of which are in journalism. They have a young daughter and they own their home, the second they’ve bought in the same city, so their lifestyle is quite settled and their connections to the community are established.
Given those factors, their relationship with the newspaper for which they used to work is instructive. First they cut home delivery back to weekends, and not long ago they took the inevitable step of dropping it entirely. They do, however, continue to subscribe to and read quite a few magazines. Notably, they’re hardly bleeding-edge early adopters. They don’t track 800 RSS feeds, and they definitely aren’t using Twitter, of which it’s entirely possible they’ve never even heard. Like the vast majority of people of all ages, they generally adopt products only when those tools clearly solve a problem, fill a need, get a job done or otherwise create new and tangible value.
All of which is to say that they were not driven away from the printed newspaper by disruptive digital technologies, at least not primarily. No, they were driven away by our industry’s old problem, the one that was killing us before we found a more convenient villain online: We’re boring. Predictable. Thin in our coverage, and often intellectually lazy and shallow.
Unessential.
Not exactly a list of winning attributes for organizations struggling to transition to and survive on a new medium. But I find my brother’s example a helpful reminder of a simple rule that we seem to all-too-easily lose sight of in our newsrooms: Create value, not traffic.
Value generates customers, connectedness, relationships and, yes, in the end, traffic. Traffic for traffic’s sake is eyeballs without brains or hearts. Value is giving me the truth, or telling me things I didn’t know about my own neighborhood. Traffic is bikini-girl photo galleries (too many out there to link to just one) and data ghettos.
john q homescholer | May 20, 2008 | Reply
Bill – This is so true. And it’s only the tip of the iceberg. Newspapers have been in decline for a long time. Radio and then TV hurt them. In the 60s & 70s, we lost the evening newspaper. Newspapers declined for a lot of reasons over the last 50 years: the Internet is only the latest step in their decline. Keep exploring the topic please.
Brad King | May 20, 2008 | Reply
When I was building a daily news site at a magazine (Technology Review), we constantly discussed the organization in these terms:
The online should exist without any content from the magazine — although we should have one staff writing both.
The magazine should be thought of as a slower, premium product that does what the Web can’t do; and the Web should be the faster, daily product that does what a magazine can’t do.
Consequently, we build one product line — in two mediums — that have grown along side each other.
Which always made perfect sense to us (and we luckily pulled it off). I think sometimes we overthink the world a bit too much.
Mr Vocabulary Builder | Aug 26, 2008 | Reply
I too have cut out any paper delivery. I read magazines and take my news on the web. Yet, I miss the newspapers but their coverage is, as you say, thin. The ads are overwhelming and the bulkiness of the paper makes it a pain. When in Europe, I always get the slim pleasant Herald Tribune, despite the price. Go figure.