Missing the Link

(Back - Seven Lessons From The New Media Landscape)

This article is not the first, nor will it be the last, to aggressively critique traditional media. However, unlike the work of our techno-utopian contemporaries, our critique should not be seen as a jubilant celebration of a dying industry. Traditional media has served society well, and with the right attitude and adjustments, could continue to do so for the foreseeable future.

Unfortunately, there is no magic bullet that can guarantee the success of the newspaper industry. The internet will create a broader, more diverse market then ever imagined, and the strategies necessary to succeed within it will need to be equally diverse. That said, based on the seven lessons outlined above, we believe that any successful initiatives will be bound by three principles.

Principle One: Concentrate On the Core

To be successful in this new era, print media may be forced to make a choice: Are they content creators or distributors? For many traditional media institutions the default choice has been distributor. Content has been outsourced to freelancers and the newswires. That is okay; distribution is a valid choice, particularly for more local newspapers. However, this choice also comes with significant risks. The newspaper medium may be relevant for another 20 years, but beyond that, what is current a steady decline will likely turn into a cliff—and that’s presuming some cheap new portable technology isn’t adopted sooner.

The more exciting possibility is for newspapers to transform themselves into “real” aggregators. As was discussed earlier, newspapers are already, in essence, news aggregators. They just limit what they aggregate to staff writers, available freelancers and what they pull off the wires (which is pretty generic). Why not draw content from across the web?

If, however, traditional media institutions want to become creators, then they must create an exit strategy from distribution. This should be welcome news. Good newspapers have always been defined by the quality of their newsroom, not the quality of their distribution network. For example, the New York Times is known because it provides a high baseline starting point for content—a quality guaranteed by its brand. Non-branded content can get to this level of quality, and even surpass it, but it takes time for a piece to filter up through the internet’s open source fact-checking process. In the internet era, this is an advantage. What a newsroom can do is “elevate the starting line.” They can create reliable content that is branded as fact checked and sourced, faster than anyone else.

Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel have remarked that “[i]n the end, the discipline of verification is what separates journalism from entertainment, propaganda, fiction, or art.” We agree. But this only gets journalists in the game. They still have to perform once there. And this means participating in the open source evolution of content. Newsrooms should supply content that others can use or build upon. Imagine a news article that a journalist manages for 2-3 days, posting good comments and redrafting the piece once or twice to reflect new information and corrections. This is a remarkably different model of content management, but it would likely be far more engaging. To succeed, though, traditional media will also have to both respect its readers and open up.

Principle Two: Respect the Long Tail of News

In an era of web traffic based measures of advertising and readership success, it must be asked, if hits are the sole metric, then why not feature soft porn on the New York Times website? The answer, of course, is that the New York Times is in the business of news, and pornography is not news. However, the line between entertainment and news is becoming increasingly blurred, and is in part driven by the highly flawed most-emailed or most-read article rankings that most newspapers include on their web pages. These measures assume that all internet users are the same, and that the goal of any site is to attain traffic from anywhere. This is simply not the case. The goal of a newspaper should be to improve the quality of their traffic, not the quantity. This means, first and foremost, resisting the temptation to gain hits by adding tabloid content to their websites.

A few points are important. First, quality reporting is increasingly a “long tail” business. The days of a handful of papers and networks dominating the market are over. What does this mean? As we have discussed, readers will reach a newspaper’s website through a vast number of mechanisms, including searches, recommendations, links, and so on. If the paper’s article is good, they may go somewhere else on the site. But the odds are that they will only return if there is another unique piece of content on the site that attracts them. This means that reported articles online are competing for readers in a very different way than a print paper. They want the person interested in the specific article, not the person interested in the entire paper. Luckily, there are many more people who want to read one article than would commit to reading an entire paper. The strategy for targeting them is completely different, though.

Dumbing down one’s content to increase traffic will only drive these long tail news seeking readers away. Worse, such a strategy forces papers to compete with entertainment, gossip and tabloid sites, which receive ten times their traffic.

Second, advertisers are increasingly concerned about the quality rather than the quantity of traffic. Again, if the sole valuation of ads on a newspaper’s website is number of eyeballs, then they will lose out to the hundreds of sites that will always receive far more traffic. Competing against the Google homepage for advertising revenue is neither realistic nor an appropriate model, as the two provide entirely different services. It is the quality and specificity of the eyeballs that are newspapers’ advantage in the online advertising game, and becoming a tabloid will only degrade that readership.

Third, if the goal is to attract educated readers who value quality reporting (i.e. ideal newspaper customers), then a website needs gatekeepers. In the wild west of the internet, it is links that drive and direct traffic. Good links, from quality sites, will make or break the type of traffic any news site receives. Central to this marketplace of referrals and links are bloggers.

Many newspapers fail to grasp that bloggers are their most avid readers. Bloggers are much more likely to read a newspaper cover to cover (or link to link) than an average, or even above average, reader. Not only does this make them good customers, it makes them important gatekeepers. If you are interested in driving up the quality of eyes that reach your site you’d better be prepared to engage, not alienate them. After all, it’s their links that drive traffic to old media’s sites and may cause people to (occasionally) buy their newspapers.

Traditional media has for too long treated its readers as uninformed and unintelligent. Most readers, especially younger readers, deserve more respect. What’s more, the long tail of news requires it. The print media should stop editing their content down, or silencing distinct voices. The former makes the content less interesting in a world where access to good content is easy. The latter prevents readers from making columnists and reporters part of their network or community. In the day when old media controlled the channel, readers tolerated limiting their connection to a faceless editor. Today, they can have, and therefore want, much more.

Finally, respecting your readers means not trying to scare them into submission. The world has changed; now move on. Over-inflating the role of newspapers serves no one’s interests. It distracts journalists and editors from their real work and alienates their readers.

Principle Three: Be Open

The power of the internet is its openness. Trying to stay isolated on the internet requires swimming against a torrent. Why not go with the flow?

First, traditional media should keep its content free and accessible. People read what they can link to. By preventing your material from being linked to and read, you are essentially pulling it off the market. To charge for online content, you need to offer something not available in the 1.5 million posts published daily, as well as the free content available in free dailies and New Media sites. This is increasingly untenable.

Second, traditional media needs to become more permeable. The staff writers of the New York Times, while certainly talented, are not the beginning and end of news. Pretending that they are is laughable, and their customers know it. Consequently, simply recreating newspapers online won’t work. Americans may be interested in living in gated communities, but they don’t want to surf within them. Web pages that interlink with others are more likely to be visited because readers will know that in addition to the base content or analysis, they will also be pointed to interesting material, both within the site and outside. Isolated news pages will invariably remain just that—cut off.

Finally, allow your readers to edit and comment. As we mentioned earlier, traditional media has a competitive advantage in elevating the starting line of content quality. However, no matter how esteemed the New York Times brand may be, its edge is diminished every second its content remains unedited and in isolation. The brand lets you move your starting line forward, but to maintain your lead, you’ll have to let your readers participate in the content’s evolution. And why not? It will keep eyeballs on the news page (and consequently the advertising), improve content, cultivate loyalty and build community, all while leveraging an essentially free resource.

It is worth noting that the quintessential counterexample to this strategy is the Times Reader. Far from a progressive solution, it is succinctly emblematic of the problem. By remaining closed, both in terms of interconnectedness and the ability to edit, the NYT is trying to create a walled garden in the internet—a (small) place where people can roam around its content virtually. AOL tried this strategy about 15 years ago, and where did it lead them? The problem with walled gardens isn’t that they keep the wild internet out, its that they keep their readers trapped in. This misses the whole point of the internet—it is a place where people go who want to roam free and be able to chase after content that interests them. To believe that the NYT can compete with all other news content would be hubris, if it weren’t so naïve.

While the previous section outlines three admittedly broad principles we believe should guide the transformation of the traditional print news industry, they do not provide a prefab template, and for good reason.

The type of transformation necessary for survival in the new media landscape cannot be predefined. It will involve creative solutions that have yet to be developed, using technology that in many instances is on the distant horizon. This unavoidable reality reinforces the need to think about the industry in a fundamentally new and open way. The major newspaper companies must stop acting like Ford, and start behaving like Mozilla. It is only by drawing on the wisdom of crowds, both for content and distribution, that these hierarchical organizations will adapt to an interconnected world.

There should be no doubt that this will require dramatic restructuring and experimentation by established companies who are not used to, or structured for, taking risk. This may very well prove to be the fundamental impediment to the industry’s renewal. Ultimately, what makes all this hard is not that the strategy must change (that is hard enough) but that the values embedded in many traditional media institutions need to evolve. A new operating philosophy is required.

What is encouraging is that the these values aren’t necessarily new to either journalism or the media industry—in fact, they are the very principles upon which American newspapers have been founded for over 300 years. While these values have remained important, they have increasingly been offset by the business demands of a centralized and closed distribution model. The principles that we feel are required for success in the new media world (focusing on quality content, respect for readers, and openness) are not new. This stuff is in your DNA. The internet allows us to go back to the beginning. Hurray.

About the Authors and Missing the Link:

Taylor Owen is a doctoral student and Trudeau Scholar at the University of Oxford. He writes online at taylorowen.com and oxblog.com.

David Eaves is a public policy, open source, and negotiation consultant and a fellow at The Centre for the Study of Democracy at Queen’s University. He writes online at eaves.ca.