Shopping for readers: a proposal for local news
As she often does, Amy Gahran got me thinking today, this time about the average-at-best job local news organizations do covering consumer news. She asks whether news orgs could focus on shopping year-round, and not just on Black Friday, to do a better job of offering utility to readers.
The short answer: yes. The long answer, though, needs to also address the nagging question of why newspapers aren’t doing this already.
Ultimately, I think the problem is how we define what journalism is. And under currently-accepted definitions, helping shoppers find deals isn’t up there with Comforting the Afflicted and Afflicting the Comfortable. The irony is – especially in our current economy – data-driven consumer reporting could be of incredible value to local communities.
To figure why this is – why What’s On Sale is relegated to the commercial side of the house – let’s step back for a second and look at what newspaper do cover.
Is this journalism?
I think we’d all agree that covering the intricacies of local government counts as journalism. Certainly tallying the numbers and types of crimes – whether through narrative journalism or in a database – is journalism as well. Grading a movie? Tracking baseball stats? Charting the financial performance of local companies? All journalism.
But what about sales and deals? What if news organizations reported on that? Where are the best shoe sales? Which grocery chain has the cheapest milk? Which stores have the worst parking lots or the shortest check-out times? Is this journalism?
And what about auto mechanics? Who can you trust? Who specializes in Mini Cooper repair? What’s the going rate for an oil change? Is this journalism?
These examples may not read like dream assignments, even for someone fresh out of J-school. But they could very well be exactly the information that people in our market are looking for, but can’t find. Anywhere.
So, if it is journalism, why not do it?
So the question is simple, but provocative: if it’s just as difficult to report on the machinations of a complex government bureaucracy as it is to scope out the best deals this week at Big Box Mall (both can’t be effectively automated and both require reporting) why do news organizations choose to do one and not the other? And are we sure that readers would agree with that choice?
I’d argue that if newspapers want to grow readership and revenue, they to do both. They need to think even more broadly about what they mean when they talk about “reporting.” And they need to think of new and more useful ways to deliver that information that gets to the user when she wants it and needs it. This flips the existing reporting hierarchy upside-down:
Imagine a team of reporters whose job it is to cover consumer spending – arguably one of the most important drivers of our local economies and something all of our readers spend many hours doing – from the point-of-view of the consumer. And not in the traditional way, through columns and slice-of-life narratives, but with real-world data that will make it easier for people in our markets to live their lives. How surprising and welcome would that be?
And imagine a structure that would allow for data to come from multiple sources – reporting shoe-leather, data-feeds from participating retailers, reports submitted by readers – and distributed at the moment of greatest need: when a reader is at the mall, in the supermarket or in the car.
For a significant portion of the local audience, this is exactly the kind of high-utility, relevant information they need and that a large, organized newsroom is uniquely qualified to provide.
If only we’d agree that it’s journalism.
Who’s doing this well? Any examples of any US newspapers marshalling significant forces against retail data reporting?
Newspapers: Unlock the vaults to readership and revenue
Go to a lot of online news sites and search the archive, and you’ll soon hit a pay wall. If you want to dig into the history of a city, the richest repository of that information usually wants you to pay for the privilege, with one shining exception – The New York Times – which opened up vast swaths of its archive to free browsing.
For years, the argument that was floated against making news archives free was that newspapers had too much revenue at stake. People would surely pay a few dollars for access to articles they wanted. Once that was put to rest (the numbers, relative to even just the current online revenue at most papers are small), we moved on to another argument: It’s too expensive to store all those articles.
Upon some poking and prodding, though, the expense turned out to be not the archiving of the articles and photos – after all, storage is as close to free as it’s ever been, and getting cheaper every day – but backing them up. The expensive hosting providers many news organizations use for their reliability and speed also charge usurious bandwidth rates for backup. And when you’re backing up years of data every single day, that does, in fact, get expensive.
So why not this: Don’t back it up. Or, just back it up monthly or quarterly. Having a 99.9% chance of an article from 2003 being available is infinitely better than not having it available at all, which is the case now when many newspapers simply throw away old articles after a few weeks.
Anyway, TechDirt (via Journerdism) has an interesting look at what opening up the archives has meant for the New York Times. There’s not a lot of new data here, but the conclusion is still valid: newspaper archives are a readership (and, if you’re doing your job right, revenue) goldmine.
Greenslade: Don’t blame newsrooms for the decline in readership
The Guardian’s Roy Greenslade often can be counted on for an interesting and accurate take on the state of journalism.
Just not today.
Today, in a stunning and sweeping mea non culpa, Greenslade, a journalism professor and former reporter and editor, looks at the shrinking audience for newspapers and echoes The Washington Post’s Paul Farhi in a clear and ringing voice: “Don’t blame us!”
There cannot be any doubt that journalists themselves – the reporters, sub-editors, photographers, feature writers, columnists, page designers – cannot be held responsible for either the financial woes of the industry nor for the public turning its back on the “products” that contain their work.
In case that’s not clear enough, here it is more succinctly, in his own words: “It isn’t our fault.”
Greenslade correctly points out many of the other factors that come into play – including the general economic turmoil, bad management and changing media-consumption habits – but for him to say that the content itself has no part – no part at all – in the decline strikes me as ludicrous, and a marker for how deluded some still are.
Any other business with declining market share since The Eisenhower Administration would at least consider that the product might be part of the problem.
Otherwise, you’re just blaming your audience for being too stupid to appreciate all you’ve done for them.
UPDATE: Steve Yelvington, as usual, has a thoughtful and reasoned take on this topic:
The deck is stacked against the newspaper, but newsrooms are not powerless victims in the grip of some irreversible cosmic force. There is still high demand for effective local mass advertising solutions. Newspapers can be that solution — in fact, they could be the last mass medium standing.
But you can’t do it with a 20 percent market penetration, and that’s what you’ll have if you continue producing a 1968 newspaper in 2008.