Zac Echola is muffin but trouble

Be it: Upward mobility

Published on 06/10/07
by Zac Echola

Part one of this series can be found here. Part two, here.

Anecdotal evidence

A few of my colleagues in the journalism business refer to their jobs as “the paragraph factory.” These people are all under 30. Notice how, even though they’re gainfully employed by a newspaper, they don’t make reference to the printed product, rather their output.

Without knowing it, they’re starting to see the separation of content and form. Their job is to write words, they don’t really care about where those words are going to end up. So long as they get paid.

* * *
I often spend lunch at a small Chicago-style deli about a block and a half from my office. There, I grab the local alt-weekly paper if I haven’t yet read it and sit down in front of the big screen TV that always has CNN on, unless there’s an afternoon Twins game. As I wait for my greasy, delicious food, I page through the paper, looking for something that interests me. I’ll listen to the TV, in hopes that some news comes up that I didn’t catch scanning the wires earlier that morning.

I imagine a lot of people in this field spend their lunches like this.

But there’s something new. I have a MotoQ. And I have a data plan through Sprint. And Google Reader has a mobile version.

When the alt-weekly, or CNN, or fails to provide anything to relevant to me, I turn to my phone and fire up my feed reader.

* * *
As a freshman in J-school, I remember my Intro to Mass Communications professor talking about mobility.

You can’t easily carry a TV with you, he told us. Laptops are nice, but finding a Web connection is difficult. A newspaper is inherently the most mobile form of news media because you can fold it up, stick it under your arm and read it on the bus to work. You can read it at the table during breakfast, on in the afternoon on the crapper.

He might have been right then, but he’s not anymore.

* * *
In the first part of this series, I talked about the synergy of the Web. Data and content are separate from form. Information on a newspaper page is stuck on a newspaper page. Information in a database can be output to a paper, to a Web site and to a mobile device.

When my journalist friends write news down, it ends up in a repository that gets put onto the Web, and into a paper. It is syndicated to readers via RSS and possibly picked up by other papers in our company.

When I’m at lunch, I can pull down any news I’m subscribed to via RSS. On a mobile device. Text, pictures and video come together on my phone. I can do the same on the bus…or on the crapper. And I’m engaging with the news. I’m sharing it like this.

As the technology gets better, so will my bathroom reading experience.

So it goes.

Howard Owens says something mobile could be the newspaper killer. I think mobile technologies in general are the newspaper killers. It is just a matter of time for smart phones with cheaper data plans and RSS and WiMax and whatever happens after the FCC’s 700 MHz auction to spread beyond the techy, business, and uber-user worlds into the hands of general consumers.

So it goes.

The game is changing…fast

This is bad news for news media, right? Wrong. It’s all opportunity to make money. It’s an expansion of reach. It’s the possibility of a wider aggregate audience.

This is a time of abundance of information. And want of information. Lots of want.

The news business has two purposes: 1) To provide information for its community. 2) To sell ads around that information.

Anybody who thinks this industry is more than that is greatly overreaching. Anybody who thinks this industry is less is vastly underestimating the business.

Many of the complaints I hear and read about money moving from newspaper and television advertising to the Web is that the dollar amount for a Web advertisement is substantially smaller than the dollar amount for a newspaper or TV spot.

I think the problem arises because newspaper types are still hung up on treating the Web as a digital copy of the paper; It is treated as another place for yesterdays news or an up-sell for print advertisers.

The Web is a wholly new product. Therefore it is a wholly new way to generate revenue.

The paragraphs and photos (and in the case of TV, the video) are the same in both products, yes. But the Web offers more opportunity than that.

“But there’s 80 billion things on there,” Larry King said of the Internet. That’s exactly why advertising is cheaper on the Web than in print. Resources aren’t scarce. Space is a commodity. Web ad inventory is determined by the size of your audience, not space or time.

Another point: because “there’s 80 billion things on there,” one Web site doesn’t cut it in the overall picture of the Web. Think about your local news providers. In your geographical region, there’s only a few sources for media. Scarcity necessitates top-down control of information.

But on the Web, we, meaning your former newspaper community, can fragment into communities bound by interest, not necessarily by location.

Hyperlocal news is an attempt rebuild communities, but don’t get hung up on the word local. It has little to do with physical location, and everything to do with relevance of a subject to a potential reader.

You’re no longer a part of your community

The news business has two purposes: 1) To provide information for its community. 2) To sell ads around that information.

Market fragmentation means that your former readers are looking more and more to other sources for information, because you do not provide the information they want or because you are no longer a member of their community.

These two issues are related. First, not providing information that people want makes you irrelevant to their community. Second, if you are providing information that is relevant to their community you are not where they are on the Web.

One Web site doesn’t cut it in the overall picture of the Web. You need to get out there and actively engage with your communities:

That means full text RSS feeds, active Facebook profiles maintained by real live staffers who drive discussions and answer questions, full-fledged mobile versions of newspaper.coms, Flickr accounts, YouTube channels, podcasts and videoblogs formatted for iTunes, and paying close attention to whatever’s next. (Ryan Sholin)

Bringing it all together

The paragraph factory mentality serves to coldly separate content from form. This is a good way to move forward by technically providing content across multiple platforms. But it feels top-down, megaphone, WE ARE MEDIA AND YOU ARE AUDIENCE. We need to move beyond this.

As reporters, producers, editors and publishers, we need to actively engage with our communities–our readership–on as much of a personal level as we can.

We, as news consumers, are also reporters, producers, editors and publishers. Give us a platform to share our content and information with you, as well as tools to share your content with others in our communities. We know our communities interests better than you do, so let us share easily. Let us be your megaphone.

This is how you grow an audience. And yes, it will be hard to meet our second purpose (to sell ads) on some platforms (like youtube or facebook) because we do not own those sites. But we’ll be engaging our communities, building relationships, and giving people opportunity to discover our products that pay our bills.

In that same Intro to Mass Comm class, my professor spent a large chunk of time one day talking about the letters to the editor section of the newspaper. It serves as a community bulletin board, he said.

Now, I think, all our content is a conversation.

The end. Or is it?

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