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News Hounds: The Scent of News Has
Gone Elsewhere While Publishers Play Catch-Up |
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31 July 2006 |
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A flurry of "innovations" are making their way into major
newspapers lately: links to competitive sources, weblogs
and user comments are a few of the developments trying to
stir things up. Yet why is it that these new features seem
so...old? As new data from Pew Research shows news
audiences old and young are no strangers to other sources
of news online and are migrating to them at the expense of
traditional news outlets. News organizations have to
retrain their noses and get pack to picking up the real
scent of news that their audiences seek. |
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When I first glanced at the
article in The New York Times outlining how The Washington
Post and other papers are going to embed news headlines from
other news outlets using
Inform.com's
news aggregation services I got a little excited. Hey, I
thought, major news outlets are finally broadening their
editorial outlook and linking to other sources. But then I read
the article in more detail. False alarm; this is nothing really
new at all. These news outlets will be embedding headlines
automatically generated by Inform.com's search of major news
outlets and other web sources into little side-boxes appearing next to an article.
BBC News started embedding links such as this
nearly
two years ago.
This is no knock against the Inform.com service, which does
a very nice job of assembling content from mainstream and Web news
sources into useful contextual clusters. But it's fully
automated and breaks no new editorial ground. Newspapers are
not really changing their mission with this service, just
adding some outbound links that require little if any
attention.
And for this we should turn handsprings...?
Let's think of some of the other "ground-breaking"
developments at news sites lately. User comments. Personal
pages. Weblogs. Links to related weblogs. Well, certainly
contemporary tools, to be fair. But none of them pioneered by
leading news organizations and all of them implemented with
strong caution - with very tenuous commitments to anything that
might upset advertisers. In the process of preserving existing
streams of ad revenues news organizations have handcuffed
themselves to parameters for financial success that are sure to
allow other ways of conceiving of news services to thrive and
grow.
The promise for online news remains strong, but it is not
favoring the timid approaches taken by news publishers in many
instances. In a new Pew Research Center study
released yesterday the percentage of U.S. adults aged 30-34
reading news online regularly increased 56 percent since their
2000 survey - and was up a remarkable 63 percent for adults
aged 50-64. But the growth is not favoring newspaper sites
strongly: more than twice the adults aged 30-64 specified "news
online" as their online source than specified "newspaper
online" - and more than 3 times those aged 18-29 declared a
similar preference.
The way that users absorb news is shifting irrevocably
towards a broader and more agnostic view of news sources thanks
to search engines, weblogs and social news services such as
Digg and
Newsvine
that point audiences towards whatever source seems relevant in
a given context. At the same time journalists, battered by
years of layoffs and unpromising career paths, are setting off
on
increasingly independent professional lives that threaten
to drain seasoned talent out of leading news rooms over the
next decade of change. Put these two trends together and you
have weakened journalism operations chasing weakened audiences
whose attention for news is split between traditional news
operations and emerging centers for news.
News organizations are learning step by step how to be an
active participant in the conversations that coalesce around
news these days, but it would behoove them to accept that those
conversations require a willingness to play a leading role in
news development that may stray significantly from their
established missions. Here are a few thoughts as to how this
thought can be translated from wishful thinking into reality:
- Time to get serious about new content. The core
product of news organizations is, and is likely to remain for
most, proprietary journalism that's marketed through various
outlets. That seems like an obvious statement, but why need
it be? If audiences have shifted away from online newspaper
sites for their news why isn't the product of news
organizations centered around whatever makes the news
valuable - no matter what its source? There's talk about
quality journalism in news organizations but fewer resources
to support it and more of a need to put news from all sources
in context. Fewer journalists chasing better stories more
effectively while link miners and online communities ferret
out a broad array of content for readers wanting to fill in
the gaps promises to be a winning equation for news portal
development.
- Time to let news goes where it needs to go. If the
core mission for news organizations remains proprietary
journalism, then start preparing for a far more aggressive
channel strategy to put it in the right places. Most news
sites are still centered on building portal traffic around
desired demographics, but
page views are lagging as a measurement for advertising
success as more users take in feeds of content to be
consumed on whatever platform suits their fancy in the moment
- including on-demand print services. The pride in a
well-edited front page is going to keep news portals a focus
of development attention for some time, but getting news to
the right context at the right time is far more important in
the long run.
- Time for new takes on print. The Pew Research
stats point to a stable print market, which has helped
McClatchy and others to develop a localized print strategy
that will serve them well for several years. The power of
interest in local affairs is propping up newspaper print
sales in many instances. But as localized online and wireless
options phase in from equally hungry phone and cable services
this cushion could be shorter lived than imagined by some
today. There's no sense walking away from strong revenues,
but if you're going to stick with print start thinking about
new ways to deliver content that people will enjoy over a
local cup of coffee. Pick up a personalized paper at
Starbucks, anyone?
It's great that news organizations are starting to look at
new paths for adding value to their editorial content, but
their prospects remain so-so as long as others are doing a
better job of contextualizing and packaging news from wherever
it may arise. News hounds may turn their nose away from such
opportunities as a sullying of the craft, but it's where the
scent of news is headed. Thanks for the link service, WaPo, let
us know when you deploy something that's a little closer to the
trail of fresh innovations.
-
John Blossom
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