February 4, 2008

For journalists, it’s less about business, more about audience

Yelv­ing­ton is talk­ing about a bias against the busi­ness side of jour­nal­ism and a class called Busi­ness and Future of Jour­nal­ism.

I would tend to agree that too many mem­bers of the Fourth Estate are phobic when it comes to dirty words like: profit, return on invest­ment, and rev­enue.

I applaud the idea behind teach­ing more jour­nal­ists more about the busi­ness side. Why wouldn’t you want to know every­thing there is to know about your pro­fes­sion — at the very least it’d make it easier for you to argue a point to management.

If you can’t know it all, know your audience

If you don’t have the time or the inter­est to learn about every­thing, then the most impor­tant thing for aspir­ing and prac­tic­ing jour­nal­ists to learn about is the audi­ence.

In my lim­ited trav­els it strikes me that a lot of jour­nal­ists either don’t know, or don’t care about the audi­ence research being con­ducted. The “don’t know” camp can be helped, but the “don’t care” camp scares me. If we’re not here to write, shoot, design and code for our audience… then who are we doing it for?

If you write a per­fectly crafted, exquis­itely shot and art­fully arranged multi-​part public ser­vice piece about your local gov­ern­ment abus­ing it’s power but no one read it, did you every really serve the public?

(Snarky com­ment: If we’re not serv­ing the public, and we’re not making money then what are we doing?)

Obvi­ously the busi­ness of jour­nal­ism can’t be summed up as “get lots of read­ers, get lots of page views” — niche prod­ucts, adver­tiser inter­est and the long tail all serve to make it more com­plex than that.

How­ever, if you can only know one thing shouldn’t every jour­nal­ist in a news­room know about their audi­ence?

In my twisted brain it’s easier to express the idea in code:

while profit > 0:
    knowledge = conduct_user_research()
    newspaper.staff.improve(based_on=knowledge)
    profit = newspaper.revenue - newspaper.cost
 
    if profit = None or knowledge = None:
        raise GameOverMan

Filed under: Business,Journalism,Management

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  • http://www.mapgoblin.com Hassan Hodges

    I’d rewrite it as such:

    while profit > 0: knowl­edge = conduct_user_research() newspaper.staff.newsroom.improve(based_on=knowledge) newspaper.staff.business.improve(based_on=knowledge) profit = newspaper.revenue – newspaper.cost

    if profit < profit.last_year or knowledge = None:
  try:
    newspaper.something_new()
  except:
    raise GameOverMan

    It’s a little less bleak, with the option to try some­thing new before rais­ing an excep­tion. And I’d also say that the busi­ness side needs to know their audi­ence too.

  • http://heisel.org Chris

    I’d def­i­nitely agree that the busi­ness side needs to know it’s audience… I think every­one needs to know the audi­ence they’re there to serve.

    But, it seems to me, that many jour­nal­ists can get down­right phobic about audi­ence wants and research — thoughts like “we have to give them the news they need, not the news they want” abound.

    Didn’t mean to single out news folks as being the only ones who don’t know their audi­ence — and its cer­tainly not all news folks — but it does seem to be a bit more pan­demic, or more will­ful with that group.