The product is the thing in the value chain right before the conversion to cash. It is the thing the quality and quantity of which sets the price you charge. That’s the audience. Make sweet journalism all day and all night if you want, without audience you have no way to make money with it.

It’s not hucksterism. It’s a reality. In fact I would reverse Marc Matteo’s formulation above, and say audience is the product, and journalism is the business model: the particular route news organizations chose to build audience, as opposed to, say, how-to publishing or celebrity gossip.

This isn’t a morally bad thing. Nurturing an audience, taking care of them, protecting journalistic credibility, empowering them, transparency: all go toward growing and maintaining a healthy audience. Stuff like journalistic objectivity, being a strong editorial voice, and so on disconnects newspapers from their audiences and is arguably responsible for some of the industry’s problems once Web 2.0 broke out.

Audience first and foremost. Not a bad thing.

Today’s newspapers are a commercialization of journalism. It is the same way that hospitals are a commercialization of medicine and colleges are a commercialization of education. I’d be happy to go on about the unique position of the processes of education, medicine and journalism in society but that’s for somewhere else. Just roll with me here for a moment longer.

If audience is a newspaper’s core product, then by that logic sick people are the core product of a commercial hospital. So then the thing that commercial hospitals want to be successful at more than anything else is attracting and making the largest possible group of sick people available to the drug companies and all the medical practitioners and specialist who use the hospital as a vehicle to gain access to those sick people for the benefit of their own businesses.

Now there might be people out there saying, “Yea! That’s exactly what fracking hospitals do.” But is that what you think they ought to be doing? Is that how you want your hospital thinking about you? Is that why you pick a particular hospital to go to, so that you can be packaged with other similarly sick people and channeled to the hospital’s actual clients? Is the quality of the hospital’s medical care just to lure you into being part of the real product it delivers to its actual clients?

Or at the core is a hospital, for good or bad, really about medicine, and a newspaper really about journalism? Isn’t a hospital’s core product really the systems it has created for connecting people with medical care in a way that it can make money, i.e. the commercialization of medicine? Then a newspaper’s core product is its systems for connecting people with journalism in a way that makes money.

If you are a publisher and you consider your core product to be audience, I’m not saying there is anything wrong with that, but then you’re in the publishing business, not the newspaper business, IMHO.

It’s not that newspapers are dying. It’s that publishers stopped being newspapers — and apparently they haven’t figured out how to be good at it like other non-journalistic publishers.

Or it could be that this form of commercialization of journalism has simply run its course, been disrupted by technology and changes in societal patterns, and that other commercialization models are on the rise.

Because journalism, like medicine and education, is not going away. It is the process that society created to inform itself, not something that someone woke up one Saturday morning and invented. As long as society needs to be informed, there will be journalism. Make a living from it if you can. That’s what I’m looking for, not necessarily some way to preserve a particular commercialization of it. Because, call me naive, but the audience is not our product. They are our purpose.

I really like the perspective that a media enterprise is engaged in two functions, as a service and as a business.

@Shafqat do we sell content or do we sell ad space? Isn’t the product the thing that is sold?

@Kim Champion good point: the audience has to be high-quality. It’s true. That’s why some companies are trying to reduce the percentage of traffic coming straight in from Google.

@Zac Echola Looking forward to seeing your posts on packaging the audience. Normally we think of packaging the content, but since audience is the product, it makes sense that that is what has to be packaged properly.

@Digidave Yes, active, engaged communities. Ties in to Kim’s point above. And my post on developing community over here.

Focusing on increasing the output or relevance of the product doesn’t solve the advertising problem facing newspapers. The product is already relevant! The ads, however, are not.

Like I said in my post, traffic to news sites is overwhelmingly good and getting better every day, but the audience has not been appropriately packaged and sold to advertisers. I’ll follow up with my post with a few more over the next few days.

A newspaper isn’t in the business of selling advertising, or news and information for that matter. It’s in the business of selling readership.