Mark on Media

Wednesday, January 5, 2005

WORKING FOR NEWS

Reaction to the Greensboro News & Record's groundbreaking proposals for remaking community journalism through it's web site is drawing a lot of comment in Blog world. A lot of it is what you'd expect from those of us who spend a lot of our "media time" online: let's roll.

Some of the reaction is a more muted, including this from Dan Kennedy, media critic for the Phoenix, an alternative newspaper in Boston.

The Greensboro experiment sounds like an interesting idea that a few people will love, but that the overwhelming majority will find makes their paper too much work to bother with. The whole idea of an edited newspaper is that a reader can sit down with it for, say, a half-hour and get some sort of comprehensive overview of what's going on in her community. This is achieved as much by what's left out as by what's put in. It can be done well or it can be done badly, but that's the mission.

Kennedy posted his comments at Jay Rosen's Press Think and Rosen has his response there. I have my own reactions.

First, I suspect that Kennedy is flat-out wrong when he writes that "the overwhelming majority" will find the changed News & Record too much work to bother with. The majority? Perhaps. But people who are interested and engaged with their community will do the work required, if they feel the reward (the information they get) will be worth it. And I suspect that there are more of them than Kennedy thinks there are.

The huge jump in internet traffic at nontraditional media sites (blogs, aggregators, Google, etc.) when major news happens shows that people will work for what they are interested in, to seek out more information about items that resonate with them.

More bothersome is this: "The whole idea of an edited newspaper is that a reader can sit down with it for, say, a half-hour and get some sort of comprehensive overview of what's going on in her community."

Kennedy's argument is a legacy media idea that has been disproved by several decades of declining newspaper readership. Fewer people are reading. And I'm not aware of any study that suggest people spend half-an-hour with their newspaper. Most studies suggest the time is 20 minutes.

That fewer people are reading the newspaper and that they are not spending any more time with it than they did a couple of decades ago (readership studies are remarkably steady on that 20-minute figure), suggests newspapers are not connecting with readers.

I think, the central fallacy of Kennedy's argument is that people read a newspaper to "get some comprehensive overview of what's going on in their community." They read a newspaper (if they do) to see what's new and, particularly, what's new that may effect them or for anything that speaks directly to their interests. We may produce newspapers that attempt to provide a comprehensive overview (and I know that, as an editor, that's what I tried to do), but that's not what readers use them for.

Kennedy's comment stands in stark contrast to another one that Rosen posted, from former USA Today political columnist Walter Shapiro.

We may look back 10 years from now and say this is when print media hit its tipping point. I'm a newspaper junkie, I wrote a newspaper column, but at least twice a week now, because I go online and check news sites, I leave the house without having read the paper. A year ago, the idea that I could leave the house without reading three newspapers would have been unfathomable to me.

10:21:03 PM LINK TO THIS POST

GREAT/BAD GATEKEEPERS

Leonard Witt at PJNet.org reports on a recent Fusion Power conference with a cogent quote from Mary Lou Fulton, publisher of the Northwest Voice.

I think one of the things that unfortunately journalism has become really good at is making people feel unimportant, making people feel that what matters to them and the things that are meaningful in their life don't have any place at all in what we do. And so I want to take that whole thing away and say hey if you want to write it and you want to send it in, as long as it's local, we'll publish it. And we do...

The problem with being a great gatekeeper is that you're keeping people out instead of letting people in.

I'm still not convinced that Northwest Voice, which is almost entirely reader written, is the best model for community-based journalism, but I can't refute what Fulton says. Newspapers, even at the community level, have taken giant strides away from the idea of relating to the reader by insisting on control of the coverage, and by defining what is important without reference to the readers.

The influences are well known: how beat reporters, for instance, get so entwined in a beat they wind up covering it for those they are covering, not for those they are covering it for. Their reference points are the sources, not the reader.

That is one of the undisputed values of Northwest Voice, which turns the definition of what's important over to the readers.

UPDATE: I've made a small edit since posting this, changing the sentence that begins "The influences are well documented..." to "The influences are well known..."
11:03:31 AM LINK TO THIS POST