Yesterday, Vin Crosbie of Digital Deliverance posted part 2 of his “Duh, you should have seen this coming” post, Transforming American Newspapers. (Yesterday Amy Gahran summarized Part 1.) In part two of his instructional diatribe, Crosbie takes us back to the past in order to understand our present… back to the technology from which daily newspapers were born: the printing press.
Newspapers adapted Gutenberg’s lead-type technology (invented for book printing) in order to print a uniform product for all consumers. However, the feet of today’s newspapers are still stuck in the lead from which they were born. Early technology limitations dictated the creation of a homogenized news product — but this doesn’t mean that people ever really wanted homogenous news.
Crosbie’s main point is that today’s newspapers have not adapted to the idea of microeconomics and to individuals’ demands for specialized information. This demand can never be satisfied, says Crosbie, by a homogenized product — even when it’s shoveled online or texted to my mobile.
According to Crosbie, newspapers use two main criteria to determining their content:
- Stories that the editor thinks everyone should know about.
- Stories that might have the greatest common interest.
He points out: “Newspaper editors’ use of those two criteria to select stories for publication has become so ingrained after 400 years of analog technology that few editors or newspaper executives are able to fathom any other possible or apt practices for story selection. Moreover, they came to believe that producing a common edition for everyone is their reason for being, forgetting it arose as a limitation of their technology.”
Two recent examples from my own newspaper, the Daytona Beach News-Journal, support Crosbie’s contentions:
- Niche news (not): Several years ago, the News-Journal held consumer focus groups with diverse constituents. Out of these conversations came the suggestion to add news from the Caribbean to our newspaper’s international pages. After all, Florida has a high percentage of Caribbean ex-pats, and our Flagler County is home to many of them. Yet this content never made it into our print pages for the very reason Crosbie cites. The needs of a minority of readers was not deemed to be of sufficient “common interest” to warrant the consistent presence on print pages.
- Breaking updates (not): Recently Tropical Storm Fay flooded Florida with rain and high waters. Community members posted hyperlocal town updates on conditions, closings and emergency aid to the News-Journal’s online community MyTopiaCafe.com (which I manage) as they became available. Our staff forwarded these to the newsroom as instructed, where they were compiled into a list. This was posted as a single article onto our online news site and in the print edition — thus losing the breaking updates value.
This print approach flies counter to the behaviors of today’s news consumer. Completeness is no longer necessary in an online community like MyTopiaCafe.com, where news can be posted by localsas it happens. As Crosbie suggests, “a partially complete story that informs the public now is more valuable than a complete story later.” Similarly, he adds that stories which may never be complete, and therefore which formerly didn’t have “news value”, now may have news value.
Crosbie states: “More than 1.4 billion people have gravitated online because they are using access to it — plus older portions of the cornucopia such as ‘niche’ magazines, topical television channels, and even now cherry-picking parts of newspapers’ Web sites — to satisfy their own uniquely individual mixes of common, group, and specific interests better than can any newspaper editors’ guesses of what interest them can.”
At its core, what Crosbie states is that news values are changing — what used to not be a story now is a story, to someone. It’s this long tail of highly diverse, niche content (often produced by community members) that newspapers should be concerned about, rather than getting the right story mix on a dying page 1A.
