"If the business side, not the newsroom, were
the guardians of the product, there might have been efforts to understand the decline, understand customer dissatisfaction."
-- Monica Moses, former newspaper designer in Little Rock, Westchester and Rochester, writing in a new CNBC guest blog post.
Ms. Moses makes an interesting point, but one I think that falls a bit short.
ReplyDeleteThe "business side" is not always attuned to customer satisfaction. If it were, circulation complaints would have eased to a trickle after the COEs went in to place. Instead, like many reporters whose phone numbers are published in the paper, I get calls daily from readers complaining their papers haven't been delivered in weeks. They called the 800 number, they say, but got no results.
The business side is focused on the bottom line. That's what Dubow, etc., have done. That bottom line has nothing to do with customers or readers.
She wrote:
It’s common to hear journalists say, “If people hate us, we must be doing something right.” Case closed.
I've never heard that phrase used in the context she places it. I've heard it used in terms of government officials or PR flacks hating us because of our reporting. But never in terms of the general public not reading us. That's just a stupid way to look at things. If people aren't reading, then your work isn't having an impact.
But they don’t think the commentators who come on afterward are helpful. They view them as part of the problem. They want to hear solutions, not bickering. They want to know how they can help. But that’s not the schtick of the traditional media.
Well, no, you're wrong. That's not the shtick of the traditional TELEVISION media. Print publications don't engage in that type of bickering. Letters to the editor are generally well thought-out, because people have to take the time to compose them, sign them and send them. Don't lump print and television together. I'm disappointed in that argument.
Bring on more advertorials!!! It's not at all transparent when we do positive spin stories about our advertisers. The readers aren't smart enough to figure it out ;)
ReplyDeleteI think the last two posts miss the point entirely
ReplyDeleteIt's not about advertorials - but it is about getting off your high horse and thinking about what people want to read.
Too often the mindset in the newsroom is 'we know what they should know' - the reader's interests be damned.
That might work when you were the only news outlet in town, but won't fly anymore
I find all these stories about the death of advertising interesting. While ROP advertising is certianly in decline, and increased readership would be a boon, rarely do I hear journalist types discuss the impact of classified ad revenue.
ReplyDeleteClassified ads were the most profitable part of any newspaper operation. Even ten short years ago, most newspapers had a virtual monopoly on aggregating and listing items for sale in a discreet geography.
That business is gone - not just because of the housing crisis and recession, but because the model has been pre-empted. Never again will newspapers be able to generate high margin revenue from real estate, help wanted and auto listings. The online search capablities far surpass anything even the most widely read paper can offer.
Thats not to say newspapers should walk away from this business. It's just that in the future the profitability of these categories will be radically different.
This is the unalterable reality that is driving down share value, profitability and forcing the draconian cost reductions seen across the industry.
Blame for the decline of the newspaper industry is equally shared between editors and upper management.
ReplyDeleteLong ago newsrooms fashioned for themselves the role of oracle. And either through ignorance or intimidation [...and I've seen both in the eyes of some publishers...] management allowed them nearly free reign over what was (and what wasn't) going to be in the product.
Rather than pulling a collective Cesar Milan on newsrooms years ago, the industry transferred blame for declining readership to external forces both real and rationalized.
It's long past time for many publishers to grow a pair and put a two-finger thump to the chest of their detached and self-righteous newsrooms.
As a newspaper veteran, I have great respect for the people who sell the ads that pay for all this journalism. However, the Chinese Wall is the only way to do this. Anything short of that is a sham. You can't be a true watchdog of the ruling class if you're spending all your time worrying about selling ads to them.
ReplyDeleteI have had many conversations with advertising and marketing staffers over the years, and they almost always end with a request that we A) write more stories about advertisers and B) write fewer stories about non-advertisers. This is not a complaint, per se, it is just a recognition that their agenda is simply not the same as mine.
In theory, Ms. Moses makes some very thoughtful points. But I don't see a practical way to run a legitimate, credible news organization where profits -- and not information -- are the
goal. That is a point that the bloggers keep hammering on -- that we are so obsessed with profits that it has made us fearful, understaffed and, at worse, biased.
I'll use an analogy from the auto industry: It's as if someone determined that it is impossible to make cars profitably if we insist on putting things like seat belts and brakes in them.
"That's crazy," replied the designer, "people will get killed."
"Nonsense," said the accountant, "you have to have an open mind here."
In other words, there are just some lines you can't cross, even if it means the whole thing goes away.
Actually, 9:33, I think YOU'RE missing the point. Maybe that's why you created METROMIX or MOMS. How's that working for ya?
ReplyDeleteMost people (myself included) read the newspaper for NEWS. Sure, some editors and reporters have an agenda, but for the most part, newspapers are there to summarize what is going on, good, bad, or ugly. If you're saying instead that they're in it to please advertisers, then I guess you should be working for a shopper.
Ah, yes, the angel's trumpet how newsroom people and editors are dedicated to printing facts and the news.
ReplyDeleteAnd then something like this comes up: WashPost's Fred Hiatt plays dumb for George Will
And yes, I know that George Will is a columnist and opinion writer, but his editor seems to have lost sight of fact-checking in favor of celebrity.
And there are so many reporters who think they are a George Will and their skimming of the facts equals in-depth reporting.
9:33a responding to 12:47
ReplyDeleteI dont think advertisers opinions about what we publish (in print or online) are terribily relevant. I DO think readers opinions of what we print and how we present that information is of paramount importance.
I'm not sure that's a belief shared by many of the journalists I've worked with over the years.
Your comments illustrate my point:
If you dont like what we do, go somewhere else (i.e. a shopper) - and anything that isnt hard news (metromix or moms) isnt valuable.
Metromix and Moms have substantial audiences of folks who enjoy its content - whether you do or not isnt important. They dont replace the newspaper, they dont even supplement it, they are a wholly seperate product owned by the same parent company.
Readers are advertisers and advertisers are readers. People talk. They compare notes. People aren't stupid.
ReplyDelete11:29 your point is well made if it were 1985. I am not being mean. Your survival is predicated on changing how you do business. The young public has rejected your mission. If you don't give them what they want you will be out of a job. Falling on yoru sword only works in dime novels and the movies. This is real life. Make a choice my friend; get iwth the program or find a new career. It's pretty simple.
ReplyDeleteTo 3:33 p.m., Just what is the program?
ReplyDelete3:33PM
ReplyDeleteWhat do young people want? Please source your answer.
And, what is the program? Please don't say "be nimble."
Thanks.
As a young person (22), I can tell you what I want. I want fun news, not necessarily true or balanced news. I want celebrity news. I want sports stories when the local pro team is doing well. I like weird stuff, like the video of the kid doped up at the dentist. I want to work someplace where they won't bust me if I come in an hour late once in a while.
ReplyDeleteI don't want boring stories. I don't know where Darfur is, but if somebody younger and cuter than George Clooney tells me it's important, I'll fight for whatever it is. I like the president because the last guy was the only one I remember. I've got some definite opinions on whether local schools are under or over funded, but as a renter I don't see the connection of cost to me.
I'm not too worried about the economy: if I lose my job, I'll go live with my parents again. I don't have health insurance because, jeez it's expensive and I never get any use out of it.
My credit card bill worries me a bit, but I have no problem paying off the minimum, the whole thing should be paid off soon, right? I download songs from iTunes all the time, but they're just 99¢ so that's not a huge cost. Good thing I have unlimited texting and minutes on my phone, let me tell you. Only $75 a month!
Right now, my biggest thing is hanging out with my friends. We're all still single, no kids. Don't have a lot of cash, but we'll sit at someone's place and drink a little, smoke a little and just chill out for hours.
So, what in your product mix for me? What combines SportsCenter, Cosmo, Maxim, Steven Colbert and Jon Stewart, People,tmz.com and Facebook - and can tell me what's hopping right here in downtown Des Moines? What costs me nothing to get, that I can download to my Blackberry or RAZR? What product do you have that I would tell my friends, "I saw it on _____"?
What advertisers do you have that would want to talk to a kid like me? Which advertisers do you WISH you had?
(Yeah, you caught me. I'm actually 32 - but nearly my entire staff is in their late teens to early twenties, and this is what they talk about all day long. And they don't subscribe or check anything but our home page carousel. What gave me away - the total lack of 'cuz' as a conjunction? No txt spk?)
939 is right about the impact of classifieds. I don't think the demand for the news product is as low as the numbers reflect.
ReplyDeleteBut I do have to agree with Moses that newsrooms aren't listening to the political climate of readers. The hostility and the left-right paradigm that 24/7 cable news and right-wing radio created is toxic.
To compete, too often we've run stories that are little more than political knee-jerk. They make accusations, veiled or direct, without an intellectual look at the whole picture, the reality.
And that hasn't served readers well. As people started waking up to the fact we had been duped into war, duped into shopping to assuage fear of terrorism while our government continued to leave the ports and the borders wide open, etc, and we failed to dig and report the truth, well, readers blamed us for not telling them.
We were too busy competing with the idiot pundit "news" business to serve our readers.
On another note, I cringed when Moses wrote about the toxicity of news. That is exemplified nowhere more -- and magnified a thousandfold -- in this new online "information" product that attaches readers' knee-jerk comments onto stories.
As a former moderator who deserves combat pay for having to read all of them, even the ones I prevented from seeing the light of day, I can tell you this is not something the news consumer public wanted. It is dysfunctional, psychologically addictive and destructive.
Gannett's answer to the problem has been to pretty much end oversight of these public comments attached to our respectable stories, and rely on a Terms of Service disclaimer that absolves Gannett of responsibility for them.
If a newspaper's "information product" can't be responsible -- and we haven't been, fully -- we lost journalism as most of us know it, anyway.
News that one person "hates" or finds hostile is news another person finds revealing of truths people need to see.
ReplyDeleteThat's not to say there aren't reporters who do bad work. There are. But even when a person, usually a subject of the story, doesn't like it, if it's done well and responsibly, they respect that we've written it.