Many journalists are loathe to care about what readers/users want to read and consume, but if you don’t have readers you don’t have a newspaper.
Far too many journalists have a journalistic arrogance, as Sam Zell put it. This arrogance journalists them to believe that only they know what is and what isn’t news. These journalists don’t care what readers and users want, because journalists know best.
But Zell is right. A lot of journalists are arrogant for thinking they know best. Most newspapers are owned by corporations, which means they are firmly a for-profit business.
You don’t make money (or hire new people or give employees raises) if employees don’t care what consumers want. Newspapers probably shouldn’t be owned by large publicly-held companies, but that’s the reality on the ground. Let’s be honest for a moment — the vast majority of journalism isn’t big Fourth Estate Journalism.
The vast majority of journalism doesn’t expose government corruption, mob activity or corporate greed. No the majority of journalism is community journalism. It’s journalism that journalists want to cover because they enjoy it or because they believe it is news.
That small journalism needs to support big Journalism. The New York Times spends $3 million a year on it’s Baghdad Bureau. You can’t cover Iraq without something subsidizing that coverage.
Zell recently told employees of the Daily Press that journalists need to focus on what readers want.
The news operation “has to be part of the solution, not part of the problem,” he said. “If we don’t have the revenue and we don’t have the readers, it really doesn’t matter what you write.”
It’s true. If a newspaper’s employees don’t care about what its readers want to read, there won’t be much to write about when that paper lays everyone off and stops printing.
Thus a newspaper must make sure that its little journalism is popular with readers. That might mean covering more high school football games (hint: people love photos of high school sporting events and high school sports in general). It might mean that the high school prom is news.
It might mean a lot of things. Ask your readers for better guidance. Covering local news that readets actually care about has been the recipe for success for the Lawrence Journal-World, winner of the NAA’s Digital Edge Award for best overall newspaper site in the under 75,000 circulation category.
No one is debating what Journalism is, but it’s pure hubris to believe that only journalists know what journalism is. Newspapers need readers, and that means covering events that people actually care about.