All The News That's Fit To Serve
Posted by Jacob Harris Wed, 29 Nov 2006 21:01:00 GMT
Here in New York, it’s routine for people you’ve just met to ask you what you do for a living (we inquire about rent when we get to know each other better, about 10 minutes later). As interesting as it was at Alacra, most people’s eyes would start to glaze over when I summarized the various minutiae of reselling financial information online (I eventually learned to describe it through the metaphor of a grocery store). But everybody knows about the New York Times, and I can almost visualize the cascade of associative thoughts—complete with press passes tucked in fedoras, people shouting at each other in a news room, and the obligatory spinning newspaper transition. This then leads right into the next question: that’s the newspaper, but what do you do at Times Digital that’s so different and special? Not much for the moment, and that’s a problem.
The lion’s share of traffic to the New York Times Digital goes to www.nytimes.com, which is largely just a reformatting of the printed paper for a web audience. Sure there are some additional applications specific only to the website (eg, you can search through movie reviews and we now have videos), but you could easily miss them, since the focus on presenting a cohesive look that mirrors the printed product all but guarantees that anything truly exclusive to the website will never be allowed to stand out. Indeed, one might get the sense that the management of the Times thinks of the Web as merely another printing format, rather than a completely different medium in its own right. Despite the fact that online readership obliterates the print subscribers these days, I would honestly be surprised if any newspaper’s editorial board contained a member who only read the paper online and “understands” the web. Furthermore, even “understanding” the Web does not entail grokking how savvy readers browse the paper online—how many newspaper editors know what a tabbed browser is for instance? or why single column is preferable to users with scroll wheels on their mice? My guess is not many. These sort of blind spots are not much of a big deal to those who want to just maintain the status quo in a new marketplace (and how mostly see the online paper as merely a convenience for people on the go), but I think there are so many unique web-only opportunities being missed out that newspapers need to grasp. And I’m going to write the next few blog posts on some ways in which newspapers might uniquely evolve online. I think the problem is not so much the people, but the cultural mindset needs to evolve a new notion of what newspapers are and how the public interacts with them. In the next few posts I will explore some ways in which the notion of newspapers might change online and how that might affect the news of tomorrrow.
But first, a few disclaimers. I’m not singling out my employer only for ridicule. Many of the problems the Times faces in the Internet age (declining readership and a demographic that’s skewing older) are striking the industry as a whole. Also, unlike some smaller regional papers, the Times has been working hard to position itself as a global news brand both in print and online, which could make all the difference between success and failure in any new web ventures. And the paper side of the operations here does at least recognize that something must be done to reverse the slide in readership and profitability and integrate the web and newspaper operations more tightly (although they don’t quite know what that might be). But the New York Times does share much of the mindset current to the newspaper industry, and I do work here, so it’s too easy for me to single them out for examples indicative of newspapers as a whole.
Also, I am not a media analyst or expert in how the newspaper business works. I do not have a journalism background and I do not even have a lot of experience working in a newspaper environment. I have never visited a newsroom and even navigating the old building’s corridors to visit the credit union or get a photo ID left me as bewildered and confused as a tired old man. It’s possible I’ll gloss over something momentous or overstate something glib. But I do think I understand the Web and how people use it and I will treat the idea with more seriousness and depth than the usual buzzwords when geeks try to reinvent the newspaper business. Hopefully it’ll be good, but as always let me know how you feel in the comments.
And finally, I do believe there is a place for newspapers in the Web world and I am working here at the Times mainly because I am interested in being a part of developing new refinements of a business model that’s been unchanged for hundreds of years
That said, on with the show! Newspapers online are rather limited, what are the ways they can change and embrace the web? I will be following up with four further posts organized into distinct but overlapping themes:
- Advertising
- Distribution
- Disintermediation
- Diversity
Notice how I started the latter three with ‘D’ to be extra clever. Those will link to the further posts when they are published, but stay tuned and watch this space.
