Printed Matters

My friend Oliver and I like to sit around sometimes and verbally save the world. We have planned space elevators, envisioned giant solar collectors at the Lagrangian points, sketched out the terraforming of Mars, and paper-engineered the paving of the Sahara with robot-built solar collectors. Everyone should have a friend like this to save the world with.

A couple of days ago we were talking about saving journalism. Now, Oliver is an artist who works peripherally – OK, not so peripherally – in the advertising world as a storyboard illustrator. So perhaps he can be forgiven for suggesting that what is needed to save newspapers, and news companies in general, is a huge dose of marketing. Branding, was his word.

He said, and I paraphrase somewhat, but only somewhat:

One thing I almost never see is newspapers advertising themselves. I don’t understand it. For companies that make all their money from advertising, you’d think they’d remember to advertise themselves. They need to tell people why people need news. I’ll bet if you asked anyone on the street why they need news they wouldn’t have a clue. And that’s a failure of the industry to market.

More than that, each newspaper needs to tell us why we need their news – why their news is the crunchiest, best, most nutritious news you can get. Imagine if the Toronto Star had a simple logo, a blue star say. (I pointed out that the Toronto Star has a logo, a blue boxy thing that looks like the end of a tie being dipped in ink. Appropriate perhaps. He said he couldn’t remember that and wasn’t buying that. – Tim) Now imagine that every time you saw that blue star, whether in a subway, a streetcar, a bus shelter, on TV – it came with a message that reinforced how much better your life would be, how much smarter you’d be, if you read news from the Star.

Of course the news would actually have to be better than all the other news. It would have to live up to the hype. But pretty soon, everyone would find they couldn’t live their lives properly without a hit from the little blue star.

“How simplistic,” I thought at first. “Leave it to an advertising guy to think advertising is going to save the world.”

But then I thought, maybe he’s got a point. I don’t see the papers advertising very much. I don’t know if Joe the Plummer could tell you why he needs news.

Then, yesterday, I conducted an interview with University of Texas journalism professor George Sylvie, who has been studying journalism and newspaper business models for 30 years, and he said pretty much the same thing:

Newspapers are finally learning what other businesses learned 30 years ago, that in order to keep the business you have to keep marketing. You can’t just say, “We do the news” any more. If Coca-Cola took that attitude they’d lose to Pepsi. They’ve got to do something else. You’ve got to keep your name out there… Even though they’re run like businesses, they don’t think in a business sense when it comes to understanding the continuing, evolving needs of their audiences.

So what would newspapers market? If news is now a commodity, available ubiquitously and free anywhere on the Internet, how can a news organization differentiate itself and stand above all the rest? How can it live up to the hype?

Oliver said it above: if, every time I followed the little blue star I felt smarter somehow – got a good feeling – then I’d want to keep coming back for more. It reminds me of a concept I knew about back when I was a fledgling website developer: flow.

According to Wikipedia, flow “is the mental state of operation in which the person is fully immersed in what he or she is doing by a feeling of energized focus, full involvement, and success in the process of the activity.”

Make people feel smart, educated and aware every time they follow the little blue star, and they will want to come back for more. They will associate the brand with good feelings. Not feeling good, necessarily, because the news isn’t always pleasant. But if you remove the barriers to flow; if you make the activity intrinsically rewarding, so there is an effortlessness of action; if there is a balance between ability level and challenge; then people will feel smart for having been on your website.

How can this be accomplished?

• Depth: let people easily drill down deeper into any story, finding out as much informational background as they need to understand the event. Links to related stories is a necessary start, but also links to encyclopedic material about the people, places, and things involved.
• Reduced clutter: don’t distract people from the main mission, which is to become more informed about an event or topic. Clean design is important.
• Good writing: as ever, simple, explanatory writing is important to keep people engaged.
• Clear headlines: and snippets, so people know what they’re getting when they click on something. If you give them something other than what they were expecting, it interrupts the flow.

Perhaps, with good marketing and excellent websites that live up to the hype, people will see news consumption as an important daily source of vitamins.

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