Printed Matters

This post by Jeff Jarvis pissed me off over a month ago. Never mind why I’m just getting around to writing about it now – but it’s important that I write about it.

Jarvis is saying – with help from Bob Wyman from Google – that newspapers should get out of the technology business. They should turn over their website platforms to Google:

Newspapers should concentrate on what they are supposed to do and stop trying to differentiate themselves with technology.

What they are supposed to do, according to Jarvis, is journalism:

So why not hand over those segments of the business to Google and concentrate on what a newspaper should do: journalism?

But journalism isn’t the business. The business is developing an audience for the journalism, and then monetizing the audience. Newspapers don’t sell newspapers, or news, or reporting. They sell readership.

So how can newspapers distinguish themselves from competitors, when everyone’s using the same platform? In other words, how can you get more readership for your stories vs. the stories on your competitors websites? Strictly by the quality of journalism? Hardly:

1. Newspapers have known for years that the quality of their journalism has almost no impact on their bottom lines or on their circulation numbers.
2. And anyway, the Internet is a whole new ball game. The game is findability. I will get more audience if people can find my stuff more easily than it can find yours. And guess what: newspapers (and everyone else) outsourced that to Google a long, long time ago.
3. You know those catchy headlines and turns of phrase found in good journalistic writing? They can actually hurt a story’s chance of being found, of developing an audience. Don’t care? You want good writing at the expense of everything else? You’re in the wrong business, friend. Right calling – wrong business.

So what happens when you do want to do something different, when you want to tell a story in a new way, and Google (or AP, or Daylife, etc.) doesn’t have that capability built yet? Good question. Guess you send an email off and wait a month or so. If enough people want that feature, then they’ll build it. Oops – there goes your differentiation again.

Within an organization, like a newspaper chain, that can be hard enough. Though you (supposedly) have their ear because you’re, after all, on the same team, you’ll wait months for a feature to be built by corporate IT even if lots of member papers want it. But think, now, if the paper has given away all its power to innovate to Google. Thousands of papers, all wanting to innovate, all wanting to differentiate. Who’s Google going to respond to? What are they going to build? Why, the things that the most papers seem to want! Bye-bye, differentiation: you can’t have that until hundreds of other papers have it too.

Even if all your platforms are belong to Google, papers will still want to have people on board who can “game” the system, and make their stuff stand out more than the next guy’s. That person will likely be fairly technical in nature. The techie’s managers will see the advantage and want to turn him loose – “Do more of that!” they’ll say – and the techie will promptly respond with “Then get me off this platform so we can really differentiate! Let me build our own platform that we can innovate on!”

You still need techie people to help your stuff get seen by more people. That’s called SEO – Search Engine Optimization – and it’s been one of the most important and most-overlooked aspects of newspaper websites for a long, long time.

If this is a critical time for newspapers, and for journalism as a business – and I’m pretty certain Jarvis thinks it is – then we need as much innovation as we can possibly get. Even within organizations like Metroland, a community newspaper conglomerate owned by Torstar, all the papers should be trying their own things, innovating, trying to be first in their markets, trying to give the people in their own communities the things – tools, platforms, whatever it is – they want. Unless, of course, they think their centralized IT department has it exactly right, and all the innovation can be left to them. But can you think of one newspaper IT dept. that has it exactly right? Can you think of one newspaper with a flawless web strategy with no room for innovation and improvement? Didn’t think so.

So can we entrust all the innovation to Google? To do that we’d need to be assured that everything they do now is flawless. Is Google News perfect? Is their search product?

The time for innovation in journalism is over. It’s mature. It’s been done, perfected, written about, studied, taught, and analyzed for a couple of centuries. It comes down to a few simple things: check your facts; include as many sources as possible; avoid bias; avoid libel. Jesus Christ, these are things a ten-year-old can grasp.

The innovation, the ideas, in the Internet age MUST come from the content delivery side. Papers need to innovate, to differentiate, to get more audience, to get more money, to support the journalism they already completely, thoroughly know how to do. And it’s hard. Really hard. We need lots of innovators working on this.

In fact, I’d turn Jarvis’s dictum on its head: fire the reporters, outsource the journalism, and invest in innovations: new ways of delivering that journalism, new ways of being more findable, news ways of developing bigger online audience. That is the challenge today.

Trackback URI | Comments RSS