2 Big Myths that are Killing Newspapers

The Big Newsroom Myth: Reporters and editors don’t need to understand how the business works.

Earlier this month, I tweeted this Robert Picard blog post about how "The Biggest Mistake of Journalism Professionalism" is how journalists “spent nearly a century denying responsibility and involvement in business decisions”.

Bill Doskoch, (@billdinto), a much-respected Twitter friend, pushed back.  “What bearing does that have on the avg reporter’s job?” 

This thinking has been pervasive in the newspaper industry for a very long time.  There is a belief that journalists should be free of knowledge of the business side so that they can carry out their reporting with integrity and objectivity free of pressure from the advertising department to report favourably about their customers.  Journalists should be above it.

I get it.

But the more I think about it, the more I realize how damaging this thinking has been to the newspaper industry.

It infantilizes the newsroom.  “Don’t talk to the kids about money – it might upset them or worse, corrupt them”.  And, it creates a state of willful ignorance, the last thing you’d want reporters to be.  Surely a mature, intelligent group of people can understand that we must report with integrity and that we work in a business that must make money.

The result of this siloed newsroom is that a large chunk of the organization has no real understanding of how the business works.   

And it’s a problem. 

Innovation in large organizations often comes from the bottom up.  That’s why Google allows company time for personal projects and has “office hours” where any employee can approach management with proposals.

A lack of business understanding leads to poor product development efforts.  Editorial recommends (or worse produces) sections and features that advertising can’t sell.  I must have seen 10 different gardening magazine proposals in my time.  (Hint: we live in Canada, we have 4 months of warm weather/year)  And then there was that fishing magazine proposal….

But far worse, it’s resulted in the failure of newsrooms to create a sense of urgency when the web emerged.  Had the newsroom really understood what it meant when the very profitable classifieds started going away, or how new capabilities in customer analytics was creating a focus on advertising return on investment and changing how advertisers were planning their budgets, there may have been earlier moves to understand the online world and to succeed in it.

But let’s not let the advertising department off the hook!

The Big Advertising Department Myth: We sell eyeballs

Not really.

Eyeballs are about mass and placement in the form reader demographics, circulation numbers, lines, columns, colour and position requests.  

What advertising departments actually sell is connection and context that lead to sales results.

Had they been thinking about their product as a connection between buyers and sellers, they would have seen the devastation that online classifieds would bring a lot earlier and taken steps to win in that space. 

They would have also seen that in the online world, their audiences are relatively small and flighty and that in that world, they are not nearly as good at providing those connections as they were in print.

Had advertising departments been thinking about context, they would have known that it creates greater user engagement and advertising click through rates.  They would have seen the explosion of online content due to blogs and niche sites that focus on narrower and narrower content areas and realized that they would need to create more of their own verticals.

Had they been thinking about connection and context, they too would have seen that the instant accountability and return on investment provided by search advertising makes it the ultimate solution.  Advertisers can now target ads directly to people who are actively searching for their products and services.  They would have seen that this would change the advertising game forever.  Maybe they would have realized that it isn’t all about banners and big boxes and that most traditional print advertising sales reps aren’t qualified to sell online advertising in such a complex environment.

These myths caused newspapers to sit back and do nothing while their world was changing.

Perhaps the biggest myth of all is commonly heard in newsrooms and advertising departments alike: That the newspaper has to survive.  It just has to.

Comments

[Account Deleted]

Judy,
You're absolutely right and your conclusions are very similar to those I made - being a strategist for a large, primarily newspaper-based media group in Russia, I have enough "objects of surveilliance", our newsrooms, editorial boards etc.
Just few days ago wrote an article on typical editor's failures of today (although it's in Russian, I found that google translate makes it at least understandable - http://www.slon.ru/blogs/gatov/post/235377/). Not exactly using Your formulas, I try to push collegues to change.
Once agian - with great respect.
Vasily Gatov
Media3 Russia

[Bill Doskoch]

Judy:

I think your criticisms are best aimed at newspaper management and not the worker bees.

I haven't worked at a newspaper in some time, but back in the day (say the early 1990s), we were quite willing to be informed about the business side. Was management eager and willing to inform us? Hardly.

If you pushed hard enough, you could do some interesting mildly things as a reporter (if you were willing to absorb the cost), but that was in spite of management. Some of the people I saw put in charge of new media development had no feel for the job -- to put it mildly.

I've not seen a Canadian media company that builds innovation into the job the way Google does. You'll have to ask very senior media executives why they believe in stultification.

In terms of corruption, I have seen publishers squash stories that were clearly newsworthy but happened to involve a sleazy used-car dealer (as one example) or affected other business dealings.

But for now, let's just stick to incompetence.

I couldn't agree more on classified ads. The online classifieds of your old employer, the Toronto Star, are a disaster when compared to Craigslist -- and I say that with a clear-eyed view to the many flaws of Craigslist. It would seem to me that if you're charging for a product, you should be clearly better than your free competitor, especially if that product is of strategic importance to your business. However, that sentiment could not have been clear to everyone.

Yes, there's been a lot of stupid product development (again, talk to management). But I've also seen products developed at the behest of advertising that still didn't sell, and I've seen ad people balk at trying to sell new products because they would have to get off their butts and cultivate new customers.

In the second part of your post, that's an area outside my area of expertise.

However, I would generally agree with your observations.

In fairness, however, precious few saw the potential of search advertising in the way that Google did.

I suspect that for a host of reasons, it would have been exceedingly difficult for newspaper companies to develop the will to carry out such a strategic shift. Unfortunately, they're paying for it now -- and so is the journalism they produce.

But again, those sorts of decisions were being made far above the heads of the worker bees of the newspapers.

[Tom Altman]

Hey Bill - good comments, but I think this IS Judy's point. And since when does the management dictate everything.

I'm sure the management I work for would be very disappointed if I took everything they said as THE only way and never pushed back if I disagreed.

Great post.