Newspapers and Baby Rainbows
A few years ago when I took a course in web development, I had an assignment to survey a number of different websites all from the same industry. Since I worked for a newspaper at the time, I chose the newspaper industry. After spending many hours on this assignment, my conclusion was that the newspaper industry was completely devoid of creativity or any thought, whatsoever, about the needs of the consumer. I found the web pages for all the different papers to be essentially the same, offering the same news in the same format, with the same crappy navigation system using the same old web 1.0 (or maybe 0.8) technology.
Since then, we have had a few years for web technology to develop and for companies to learn the ropes of the new system. For the most part, though, newspaper web sites haven’t improved beyond adding some video and maybe a search function. Circulations are down, advertising is way down but there doesn’t seem to be a lot of creativity going toward finding solutions.
Or does there?
I’m beginning to think the story might be more complicated than that. There might even be grounds for hope. Maybe. Don’t go buying stock in news media yet, but don’t write them off forever, either. I mentioned in a previous post (April Random Roundup) that my old employer the Rochester Democrat & Chronicle was planning on launching a pay-walled version of the web site. I expressed just a tiny amount of skepticism as to whether it was a good idea. Since then, there’s been a change. The site was late launching and then the D&C’s masters at Gannett pulled the plug on the whole idea. Apparently, there’s some thought of corporate rolling out a pay-site solution company wide. At least, that was the excuse I heard. It’s just dumb enough to be true, too.
I started thinking along more positive lines when I looked at the pay site (shortly before it was taken down). One thing that stood out to me was that the design was far better than standard newspaper web sites. Instead of the usual disorganized jumble of headlines, section links and ads (Oh! They have tabs now! So Gannett properties are up to the 20th century finally!) there was a simple, tasteful layout with a few headlines and a series of very easy to use drop-downs for navigation (It also had the same old boring content but that’s another story).
This reminded me that even a failed experiment is often worth trying, for the lessons learned and skills acquired if for nothing else. Gannett could have allowed the D&C pay site to proceed and tracked it as an important experiment. It could have been used as a way to try out lots of new ideas and to train people in applying technologies that, frankly, newspapers have mostly ignored in the childish hope that they would go away. The difficulty of getting upper management to even consider new things frustrated me numerous times when I worked there. When they finally decided to give something new a decent shot (even if it was the wrong thing to try), corporate stepped on them with all the deep insight and careful timing usually expected from lifelong bureaucrats (In case you’re wondering, that was an example of a literary device known as irony).
For the record, the idea that it would be better to try the whole thing corporate wide is idiotic. That’s not an experiment it’s policy. If it goes wrong, it goes wrong everywhere. And everyone learns the same lessons from it (history shows that lesson to be, “Those people at corporate are morons!”).
The stifling of innovation, not just from the D&C but from every other site like it that was thinking of trying some kind of experiment of its own, is emblematic of what’s wrong with the entire industry. It’s funny, really, that an industry that depends so heavily on writing should be so hostile to creativity.
But I said there was room for hope and I meant it. In recent days there have been numerous stories about efforts by various news agencies and companies to try things they haven’t before. Interestingly, the analysis is almost always similar to my original take on the D&C pay site: misguided and too late anyway. That might even be true of each individual story. But taken together, it shows signs that the newspaper industry has finally started earnestly looking for new ways to tackle the systemic problems that have been dragging them down. Here are a few:
He has a number of ideas about how papers can improve their revenue. Some of these ideas are familiar to those of us who’ve been screaming (mostly metaphorically) at newspapers for years but they are still not mainstream. He has this wild theory that creative ways of using technology to give customers value might get them to spend money. Interesting stuff.
A New York Times story about electronic readers for newspapers
There’s been a lot of buzz about this one lately. Several companies are apparently going to put out a clipboard-sized flat screen device that people can read their newspapers on. Most analysis I have seen has been highly skeptical (See here and here for example) and with good reason. But the whole idea is a century ahead of the thinking of most newspaper executives (which puts it around the year 1953 but that’s not the point!)
An interesting one about the Chicago Trib actually asking customers for comment on online content
Some journalistic types appear to have considered it a breach of ethics to do this (maybe because it was done before stories were published, though that might just be a cover for indignation at the possibility of being judged. Again, for purposes of this post, the reason doesn’t really matter). The more interesting thing is that newspapers have been very slow to embrace the idea of working with online readers rather than merely shoveling content at them. Despite the reaction to this one, expect to see more of it in the future. This is probably more important than delivering content to fancy new gadgets.
Last on today’s list, Rupert Murdoch wants to charge money for access to the news
This is another one of those doomed-to-fail experiments but maybe it needs to fail spectacularly (as only someone of Murdoch’s caliber can) for people to get the point that locking up content and charging for access only works if people are reasonably sure the content is worth money. If you can just click a couple links to read the same thing on some free site, there’s no chance at all of making money off of it.
Anyway, despite negative reviews for so much of the stuff in the list, taken as a whole what I see is a burst of innovation and experimentation (outside Gannett) that will likely go on for years and produce some real successes in with the failures. Just the act of criticizing someone else’s experiment will help other people at other papers come up with their own ideas. They may be just as hare-brained as the originals but with new twists and new combinations of features, until something clicks. Notice that I’m not saying that newspaper-sized e-readers or pay-walls are the answer. I’m just saying that the atmosphere of experimentation, of competing to produce ideas, is healthy.
This is where the hope for newspapers (and newspaper readers) starts: With humans cooking up crackpot schemes – that sometimes work. Keep your fingers crossed.
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