March 9, 2004

Give the readers what they want

OJR has an excel­lent arti­cle by Vin Cros­bie that talks about an issue near and dear to my heart: customization… or give the read­ers what they want. (thanks, Nathan)

If news­pa­pers, online and dead-​tree alike, are going to move for­ward we have to start treat­ing our read­ers as indi­vid­u­als. The one-paper/site-fits-all men­tal­ity has got to go away.

The auto indus­try moved away from the “any color you want as long as it’s black” and most, if not all, man­u­fac­tur­ing indus­tries are moving toward mass cus­tomiza­tion.

The news­pa­per indus­try has for­got­ten that it’s not a man­u­fac­tur­ing indus­try (well one part of it is, but I’d hardly call online pub­lish­ing manufacturing…).

I see this at work all the time… “topic x doesn’t get many clicks, so we don’t do much with it”, which is the online equiv­a­lent of “topic x doesn’t test well with the focus group so we don’t cover it that much.”

Well, does it not do well because no one’s inter­ested, or does it not do well because you do noth­ing with it?

Simply put, there’s an audi­ence for every topic you can imagine… net­work tele­vi­sion is learn­ing that lesson the hard way as their num­bers flee to spe­cialty cable stations.

In the news­pa­per indus­try all of our con­tent is cap­tured dig­i­tally, whether it’s coming from the wire or local sources… it’s just a matter of making our inven­tory avail­able, instead of keep­ing most of it in the store­room — or worse, our competitor’s stores.

It’s time the news indus­try wake up and work to pro­vide every user with the con­tent they want, the way the want it and when they want it.

The tech­nol­ogy is there… the only thing miss­ing is the will to do it.

Filed under: Business

Next:
Previous:

Related

Comments