Information ventures like newspapers and magazines can learn a lot from the likes of Google and Web 2.0 publishing, but they are slow to pick up on the lessons. Why is this?
Traditionally, newspapers were the first to capitalize on groups of people’s interests in the one niche that they filled; news. They ’sold’ this interest on a collateral basis to advertisers. They ensured editorial freedom and guaranteed readers immunity from greedy advertisers by selling only a quantity of anonymous interest in ‘news’, translated in raw circulation figures.
What is so difficult in breaking down these numbers a bit more and simply selling bulk ‘niche’ interests? Google seems to have cracked a fool proof formula that is way more complicated than your average newspaper business, so why are newspapers not inventing their own models?
Somehow, newspapers appear to have difficulty in understanding the urgency of the matter. Initiatives to approach readers in community style ways are taking off, but newspapers are by no means competing with the numbers that some web2.0 ventures attract.
They might have entered the game too late to set a trend, something that’s traditionally been their role. This impacts newspapers not only economically (declining reader numbers), but it also increases the hesitance that besets the newspaper writers, who are not so sure just what editorial freedom is anymore, and whether it should have a role at all. After all, competing blogs and web2.0 productions tend to run really well on highly personalized, often totally biased, writing.
Journalists who stick to rigid formulas simply make fools of themselves in a world that is increasingly marked by flexibility. There are so many new trends, toys, tech products everyday that people’s adaptation skills are at the max at the moment. As a journalist, I stick to a simple little rule in writing articles nowadays. I write as if my audience consists of fellow journalists. I write as if I am telling a newsroom full of burping, farting and on Fridays, beer guzzling, fellow reporters about a story that I am in the midst of writing.
Not only does this approach relax the style, but it lifts the debate to where we all might somewhat communally be. Next change I think I am going to make to my reporting is keeping a close eye on trends in the media as businesses. To understand how the media business models change is something that will keep me as a reporter on edge. It certainly will provide better insights into what are the better stories for online audiences. This is something I am facing mostly on my own, because my customers (a few established papers that are paying less and less for more and more work) do not focus on informing their employees how the business of journalism is changing.
You and I might be having a ball on the Internet, subscribing to Google news alerts on umpteen topics, getting the latest news delivered to phones, downloading podcasts with highly useful free information etc, but at the same time people targeting you and I, who used to think about their audiences in orderly demographic numbers, are complaining bitterly. Some say that the Internet has more than anything else, led to more fragmentation of audiences into unrecognizable entities. On the one hand, I can’t help but smirk about that. Stories about chaos theory initially must have sounded similarly refreshing.
But the jury on online audiences and groups, branding, and marketers’ ploys is still out. The question of whether online audiences are we more involved communitywise than before the Internet era dawned is answered in differing ways by differing people. But at the same time, trends simply materialize without seemingly to take any notice of who’s shouting what.
So I will only issue this comment; it’s certain that we’re less than barred from online participation on issues than ever. If a group doesn’t allow you from discussing a topic, you can simply start another group about the same topic. Two’s company!
Community building takes time. This is emblematic of trends in the media as well as trends in society at large. Human beings do not immediately adopt new communication formats without any hesitance and consider them to have the same importance as other social participation formats.
Once something becomes ‘viral’ to the user themselves, it’s likely that a significant barrier will have been passed. However, something needs to catch on first. Whatever that something turns out to be, god knows. It’ll be a mix between a Pandora’s Box and a surprise. We’re only human, after all.