|
Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...
|
In a powerfully worded op-ed, HBM Advisory’s Alan Hunter argues that we have to give our readers stories they want to read, not avoid. Part of this is the recognition that news publishers are content producers, just like everyone else. Only armed with this understanding, can journalism then thrive…
In his recent memoir, Collision of Power, Marty Baron, the former editor of the Washington Post, takes a moment to rail against what he sees as an unfortunate trend sweeping the august halls of America’s newspapers:
I had been in journalism long enough to witness some executives—unmoored by crushing pressures on circulation, advertising, and profits—abandon the foundational journalistic culture, even shunning the vocabulary we use to describe our work. Many publishers took to calling journalism ‘content’, a term so hollow that I sarcastically advised substituting ‘stuff’. Journalists were recategorized as ‘content producers’, top editors retitled ‘chief content officers’.
He is not the only senior journalist to get so agitated by the fruits of his labour being so described. I once sat through a whole conference session in which an esteemed media commentator attributed almost all the ills afflicting the profession to this one neologism. He practically spat the word “content”.
In a recent New York Times profile of Emma Tucker, the new editor-in-chief of The Wall Street Journal, it was said that within her newsroom, some journalists had “recoiled at her use of the word ‘content’ instead of journalism”.
I believe they are wrong to do so – and that the sooner journalists accept they are producing content the more likely they are to succeed.
For too long, journalism has been getting high on its own supply. News providers around the world are very quick to tell you that they “speak truth to power”, “uncover the stories people don’t want told” and “bear witness” to earth-shaking events.
I’m not saying they don’t do a lot of these things. Indeed, when I was working as a journalist, these types of stories were the things that most excited me. I got a thrill from talking to David Walsh as he exposed Lance Armstrong as a drugs cheat; from taking adds over the phone to Marie Colvin’s copy from Basra; and from spending a night – yes, a whole night – with Brian Deer and the Sunday Times head of legal as the latter quizzed us about every line of Brian’s latest MMR vaccine expose.
But these stories are fewer and further between than the cheerleaders for “journalism” would have us believe. Too much of what is produced is prosaic and unmemorable, and increasingly published at huge volumes. A recent report in the Press Gazette looked at the daily story counts of news publishers in the UK. It revealed that many were publishing many hundreds and one even thousands of stories a day. I don’t need to tell you that a lot of this isn’t the kind of “journalism” that Baron would recognise.
This gets to the root of the problem: we are producing a lot of “stuff” while acting like we are only producing journalism.
As journalists, we demand special treatment from Google (in particular) and the other tech giants; we demand protection from AI companies that are consuming not just ours, but the whole world’s content; we ask for tax breaks to boost our digital profits; we refuse to be regulated; and so on. We run campaigns called things like Journalism Matters – think about it, if we were really sure it mattered to people, would we have to tell them?
Giving readers what they want to read
I would argue though that if we recognised ourselves as content providers we would be putting ourselves in a better position to survive and maybe even thrive.
We would recognise that many of the stories we are producing now are not meeting the needs of our users. I am convinced that this is a real contributor to the current increase in news avoidance, as reported by the Reuters Digital News Report. People say they find our stories too negative, too depressing, not relevant to them, not balanced enough. Can you blame them for giving it a miss?
Product-market fit is a phrase beloved by marketers and consequently anathema to most journalists. But they are onto something. We have to give our readers stories they want to read, not avoid. There are plenty of news products out there that wouldn’t see the light of day if they were not anointed with the tag of “journalism”.
Even if they aren’t actively avoiding the news, people also don’t read as much as you might imagine. A head of product at a publisher that is regarded as very successful by its global peers told me recently that “even our most engaged subscribers read only four of our stories a day – that’s only 5% of what we produce!” He was rightly concerned about what this meant for the future.
If we were straightforward about what we are, we would spend a lot more time improving our digital products. Too many of them remain a digital version of a newspaper, built to look similar to their print predecessors, with stories organised in the same way they always have been. There is an assumption that because it’s “great journalism”, people will forgive the terrible navigation, clunky UX and appalling search functions. In the long run, they won’t.
Our competition is….everyone who creates content
If we accepted we were in the content business we would really think hard about the ways in which digital users, especially young ones, engage with it. They do it more often, from many different sources, in many different formats – but almost always on the phone. Text is still the prime medium for journalism but it won’t be in the very near future. Which news brand is truly prepared for that?
We would also acknowledge that our competitors are not the former newspapers whose names we know so well, but every single entity that is competing for users’ attention online. It focuses the mind somewhat to think that your work is having to compete with the Beckham documentary on Netflix. In the eyes of users, news publishers are very much just content producers like everyone else.
I acknowledge that many publishers are thinking hard about these problems, and I’ve had some hugely stimulating conversations with them about the future direction of the news business. But too often we hide behind what we see as a higher calling and don’t accept that the wider world doesn’t think about it remotely as much as we do.
And I firmly believe that if we analyse our work as content, we will find that there is one type that will secure our future because it is the kind of news that people will pay for. What’s that type? Of course, it’s journalism.
Alan Hunter
Co-Founder, HBM Advisory
Alan is a co-founder of HBM Advisory, which partners with clients to maximise the value of their content businesses. Among others it has worked with the Wall Street Journal, Future plc, Harvard Business Review, The Scotsman and the Indian Express. HBM Advisory is a partner of Media Makers Meet’s Collectif Network, a strategic partner community that brings together industry technology leaders and media advisors to benefit from various exclusive initiatives and to add their voices to wider industry conversations.
To learn more about Collectif, please contact TJ Hunter, VP of Commercial and Head of Collectif, at tj@mediamakersmeet.com. If you would like to participate as a thought leader, please write in the first instance to Jez Walters (jez@mediamakersmeet.com).
