Newspapers are in trouble, we read every day and as a newspaper person by career choice and a news junkie by habit, I grieve while doing my best to seek solutions.
I also see that current conventional wisdom holds that magazines like TIME, Newsweek, Sports Illustrated etc., like newspapers, are on their last legs.
I don't fully buy it as all such outlets by now have long since transformed themselves into multi-purpose media platforms. The trick remains generating revenue/profits from such streams while fighting off/coming to agreements with those aggregators who claim and post our material as their own - a double-edged sword in terms of exposure for the media outlet which in the end is not likely fairly compensated.
That aside . . . So often, on a purely newsworthy level, I pick up a paper and see a feature story that's already been covered in depth in a news- or sportsweekly. And it bugs me. Why aren't we in the daily press generating this material first? Sure, we're consumed in the moment of breaking news, but surely we could make/find the time . . .or redirect that time; in other words, make better choices in terms of what content we are providing.
Just today, I picked up the National Post sports section to find an article on Joey Votto, the Cincinnati Reds' Canadian slugger who was the Sports Illustrated cover story this week; a piece I had already read before getting to the Post. So, why bother? Kudos, I guess, to the Post for turning their matching story around so quickly - though much of it seemed cribbed from the SI piece - but where has the Canadian media been on this guy to date? I'd seen some material before today, but not much.
Same issue, a Post staff piece on the Detroit Tigers' Miguel Cabrera's comeback season that was in SI the week previous. A relatively weak facsimile of the SI piece.
I could go on with such examples from TIME and so on. It is/has ever been thus, I realize, each media outlet whether it be radio, TV, daily, weekly or monthly print, essentially stealing from each other.
And then I turn to the back issue of Vanity Fair I found lying around the gym change room today. The first 40 or so pages were ad pages in a 200-plus page magazine/book. Thick, rich, filthy lucre. Followed by all kinds of in-depth articles. It seems the monthly magazine business remains healthy, perhaps surprisingly in this fast-paced world but in reality not surprising at all - one can appreciate kicking back and ruminating over the month's events at a slower, more measured pace than the daily cacophony mercilessly imposed upon us.
More thinking, less immediate reacting (granted, a difficult thing to pull off given ingrained culture but a vehicle for that immediacy now exists via the web) and newspapers - again, on a strictly newsworthy level - will be in better position to survive and prosper. Think every story through, assess its value, the interest it generates, gauge it by web statistics that for the first time ever actually tell us what people are at least clicking on, and go from there. I would submit we in this business flatter ourselves; we've never truly known whether people consume our stories - in large measure they more likely consume and have consumed our TV listings, our grocery flyers, our weather maps, our horoscopes, our obituary listings - the so-called news you can use or that actually interests people and this is proven via web statistics which have yet on a grand scale to sway the print thought process, to its detriment.
Give the people what they want (crime, trivia, tripe, celeb culture, the offbeat, controversy, commentary). What they need (where's today's traffic jam?). What they should know (what happened in Parliament today, snore, though important).
The trick is determining what weight to give each element while knowing, understanding and, yes, catering to your market. I suggest 'what they want' and 'what they need' is where we ought to better direct our efforts. The proof is in the numerical analyses.
