Zac Echola is muffin but trouble

Be it: On dinosaurs in ivory towers

Published on 28/02/07
by Zac Echola

Andy Merrit at The Blog Herald, wonders if this Webomatica post isn’t wishful thinking; Webomatica suggests that reporters start blogging the news, instead of giving us yesterday’s news today.

They’re talking about the newspaper industry’s declining readership and, in particular, these comments from Steven Rattner:

The time that Americans spend reading newspapers has been dropping steadily (now down to 15 hours a month), with scant evidence that quality Internet time is taking its place. In September, the average visitor to newspaper Web sites spent only 41.5 minutes per month on those sites, up 10% from the previous year but not nearly enough to make up the loss.

Rattner argues that Americans care less about the news today than before; particularly younger readers, who seem to get hung up on tabloid news. He suggests, though somewhat indirectly, that this supposed change in reading and viewing habits is forcing newspapers to think differently about what should be considered news.

I think that sentiment couldn’t be further from the truth about what’s going on in the minds of readers. We live in a time where information is fractured, not dumb.

We live in an age where, if I care to, I could read only NASCAR news, or entertainment news, or news about Estonia, if I care to. With the Web, such coverage is as deep as it is wide if you know where to look. Never before could people get such a breadth of information about a single topic.

Magazines understand niche marketing, as do cable TV stations. You pick a topic and build a small audience around that topic, then, you start (or buy) another company geared towards another topic and so on and so forth until you become filthy rich. For some reason or another, newspapers still try to be everything to everybody.

Attention is a zero-sum game. People don’t like wasting their time with something they don’t want. People especially don’t like paying for a whole newspaper when all they want is the funnies. Look at the recording industry, working its way back to the single song model pre-rock operas.

Average visitors to newspaper Web sites only spend 41.5 minutes on those sites because that’s all they need to spend to get what they want.

So, instead of fracturing their products to various niche markets, newspapers, in an effort to reach as many people as possible, have been targeting the lowest common denominator of readers: idiots.

Anna Nichole Smith graced the cover of many local papers, as did Britney Spears, when she shaved her head this past week. In an effort to compete with round-clock-TV “news,” arguments for A1 placement abound. Matt Von Pinnon, editor of The Forum of Fargo-Moorhead writes (registration required, and come Sunday, it’ll be in a pay for archive):

I could hear the groans even before the story hit Tuesday’s front page. “Britney Spears and her latest crazy escapades are not front-page news,” they would say. “Save it for the tabloids,” other readers would write.

Similar sentiments came from our newsroom, sprinkled between ongoing banter about what led one of America’s all-time top pop singers to shave her head after checking in and then quickly out of an off-shore substance abuse treatment center. (This in-and-out sequence would continue all week.)

So why the front page?

Because, admit it, you read it, and you’re talking about it.

Some of my readers will note that I work for the same company as Von Pinnon and I even sit in on the news budget meetings as an online representative. Our company blogging policy states that I can’t talk about work, so we’re going to have to leave it with what Von Pinnon publicly says.

But I’m not sure if Matt’s argument is what’s good for the public. We in journalism have always sat at high and decided what is news and what is not news, but the Internet, and before that, TV news, threw a wrench in our silly operation.

Romenesko gathered a few other sentiments about the whole ordeal:

There’s real news embedded in the ongoing soap operas involving Britney Spears and Anna Nicole Smith, says Eric Deggans. “And a media-weary public needs quality journalists like [NBC News anchor Brian] Williams to pull substance out of these tawdry messes.” || Walker Lundy: “TV went dead-on nuts” over the Anna Nicole story. || Bob Garfield: “Editors are like bartenders, who must serve up what’s ordered provided they know when to say, ‘Sorry, bub, you’ve had enough.’”

So now we’re stuck in the funny situation: do we give people what we think they want or do we give them what we think they need? And will either bring back readers?

If our audience is shrinking, so too should the paper. I’m not saying to cut the news staff and only run bland wire infotainment. There’s still a huge audience that would find it a damn shame if the news completely turned into this mess and dropped its obligation as the Fourth Estate.

I’m saying the papers should diversify with smaller products geared towards smaller, targeted audiences. If they want to survive, they should provide products (such as tabloids and guides) that make money AND products with hard-hitting news that garner peer respect and win pats on the back from colleagues. Instead of having one big business failure, have one little business failure and a few more little business successes.

I’m weary to say that bloggers are here to save us all from the top-down style of news that comes from gray-hairs in New York and Washington, D.C. They’re not. For the most part, bloggers are idiots, too. Sure, there are a few bloggers that fact check and a few traditional journalists that don’t, but that’s not the point.

The point is access. For the most part, bloggers don’t have access to contacts at the Pentagon. They don’t have access to White House press conferences. Bloggers aren’t on the front lines in Iraq.

That’s where newspapers, and to a lesser extent TV, shine. They have decades of experience as organizations dealing with governments, dealing with massive corporations and dealing with corruption and fighting at all levels of human existence.

Bloggers don’t have that kind of organization. At least not yet.

Because of this, I’m also hesitant to say that “crowd wisdom” aggregaters like Google News and Digg are going to solve anything. Google News at any given time can look like USA Today and Digg is full of, well I’ll just come out and say it at my own risk here: crap.

Thoughts?

The end. Or is it?

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