The whole historical argument about news and technology can be compressed into one iconic symbol: the telegraph. Trains were faster than horses and carrier pigeons, but the telegraph was faster than a train. That was 170 years ago.
The telegraph spawned both the wire services and the inverted pyramid. A hundred newspapers could run the same wire story on page one because readers generally could not see the New York newspaper and the Pittsburgh newspaper at the same time, in the same place.
Now they can.
The first step to thinking about the future of the news business? Accept that news – raw, up-to-the-minute, see-it-now news – is a commodity. Everybody has the same news, unless it is right in your geographical backyard. (In that case, you ought to cover the heck out of it, because nobody else will.) Stuffing the printed or the digital product full of what everyone else has? That is killing the news business.
Newspapers have long been involved in a lot more businesses than news. Readers have relied on newspapers for diversion, conversation starters, education, entertainment, ideas about how to live and what to do to have fun, and something the academics call “surveillance” since long before the telegraph made it sensible to rely on wire services.
I used to buy a newspaper on Saturdays because I wanted to see a movie. It’s been years since I’ve done that. I still see movies on weekends, but now I always get the show times from Google (www.google.com/movies).
I used to subscribe to the local daily, until I calculated that I spent more time each week listening to the circulation department’s telephone voice menus than I did actually reading the newspaper. The paper was so often not delivered, or delivered soaking wet, that it became unreliable as a source of news and information to me.
Those two anecdotes help point the way to how the newspaper business can improve itself and its prospects.
Content
Some motivations to buy a paper, or to look at the paper, have migrated elsewhere. Movie listings are one example. Stock tables are another. Concentrate on the motivations that still exist and on new ones that you can invent. (Google even has show times for my town’s wholly independent art cinema; movie listings are over.) Commodity news is not a motivation. Like the movie listings, people are getting that somewhere else.
Delivery
Declining circulation might have as much to do with physical factors as with content. It wasn’t dissatisfaction with my newspaper’s content that made me cancel my subscription in disgust. A very different example of physical factors is the free weeklies (such as RedEye in Chicago) that have been so successful. Even though the free paper is full of commodity news, it provides a diversion exactly when people want it – as they board a commuter train or bus.
Give some thought to this physical factors argument. You might think I would still buy a printed newspaper to check the movie listings if, say, I were having brunch with friends, and we suddenly decided to see a movie afterward. Nope. I would pull out my BlackBerry and check Google there in the restaurant, without leaving my biscuits and gravy.
Easy access is a big part of delivery today: Can I read it on my mobile device? Does it play properly there? Will it download fast?
Obviously, I don’t think of the news business as being limited to paper, or even to computers. The adaptations needed mean more than simply reformatting so that the phone-screen version looks okay and does not keep me waiting. They extend to searchability—which means meta data, such as keywords, and also user-generated tags, descriptions and referrals. You will need to earn my loyalty by being there when I want you and by being easy to use, like RedEye—and Google.
As for content, we don’t need another Google any more than we need 800 copies of the same AP story on every news home page in America. You know you are competing with The New York Times online, with 24-hour TV news channels, with radio during commute time and with the whole Internet all the time. Does it make sense to try to compete by being the same as any of them?
No other content provider has as large a staff of news gatherers and editors as a newspaper newsroom. This asset should enable the local newspaper to differentiate its products from all those other entities. The newspaper’s staff of trained journalists makes it possible to do things – where you are – that that no one else can do. First, because those others are not there – in your town, your state. Second, because they do not have your people.
Because I’ve been studying and practicing online journalism for 13 years, you might think I’d be talking all about gadgets and digital media such as online video. I think that’s exactly the wrong focus for thinking about the future.
Content and delivery are the two fundamental things that require our attention in journalism.
- What content can we deliver, with our people, from our newsrooms, that appeals to an audience that we can build and retain?
- How must we deliver it to make it irresistible to that audience?
Content: To me, “appeal” doesn’t mean pandering. People can get “all Britney, all the time” in too many places. That’s the commodity trap we need to avoid. Stories that are interesting and original do have appeal. Too much in the newspaper is just plain boring. Many articles are too long. Many columns read like filler, not really saying anything new. Above all, I look for stories I haven’t heard a hundred times already in my life.
Content should be a mix of diversion, conversation starters, education, entertainment, ideas about how to live and what to do to have fun, and “surveillance.” Surveillance is academic-speak for checking out what’s going on. Surveillance is what the meerkats do when they stand up on their hind legs, looking for danger. Surveillance is finding out that the (local) housing market is going to crash—before it’s too late. Surveillance is learning whether (local) schools are getting better or worse.
Delivery includes, yes, online video, and mobile (cell phone) updates and headlines, and maybe the free tab beside the bus stop – if people ride buses in your town. (If not, maybe you ought to give them a daily 30-minute podcast they can download and listen to in the car at 6 a.m. Go on, steal that radio audience. I know podcasts have failed in many places – but then, I have heard some absolutely horrible podcasts produced by newspapers.)
Delivery also means having a Web site that doesn’t make someone’s eyes glaze over because the ads are flying over top of the editorial content, the news is 12 hours old, and the layout is so hard to decipher, it might as well be a Rubik’s Cube.
Delivery is, first and foremost, everywhere and any time, with maximum convenience and speed. (Today RSS has a lot to do with making this happen. Tomorrow it might be another technique.) Searchability and cross-linking among related pieces are vital to effective delivery. Without them, delivery is neither convenient nor fast.
When I think about a successful news product for the future, I think about what I would want to pay for. I quit paying for my local printed newspaper because it was not delivered effectively. Then I quit reading it online because the Web site was too slow and cumbersome. That’s also a delivery problem.
Even if the delivery factors are resolved, I know I still won’t be diverted from all the other great content out there on the Internet and TV unless my newspaper regularly gives me stories and information that are interesting and original and based on where I live. Frankly, if it’s not about this place, I can get a better version somewhere else.
We’ve come full circle from the time when the telegraph expanded our interests to encompass the whole world. I have the world on my cell phone in my purse. (The BBC provides excellent RSS feeds.) What I don’t have is effective access to what’s really important in my own town.
Mindy McAdams is a professor in the Department of Journalism at the University of Florida, where she teaches courses concerning online journalism. Her book “Flash Journalism: How to Create Multimedia News Packages” was published by Focal Press in 2005. Before moving to Florida in 1999, she was the Web strategist at the American Press Institute. In 1994, she was the first content developer at Digital Ink, The Washington Post’s first online newspaper. Previously, she was a copy editor for 11 years. She worked on the Metro desk at The Washington Post and at Time magazine in New York.
