The Catalyst Code

The latest WeMedia/Zogby poll citing that most people use the internet for their primary source of news and information is hardly a newsflash. We’ve been reading about the newspaper industry’s demise now for a couple of years as a result of fewer people reading the paper and therefore fewer advertisers using it to reach the audience that it once attracted.

What is interesting about this survey though is how more than two-thirds of Americans believe that traditional journalism is out of touch with what people want from their news. And they’re right. Before 24/7 news sources on cable and via the internet, the daily paper was THE place to get news and analysis of what was going on in the world. Now, print papers, with a few exceptions, simply rehash the same stories we all heard about yesterday. Anything that is in the daily paper that day these outlets also cover, but in nice short soundbytes or email headlines so that readers don’t even have to touch the paper in order to get access to information that is relevant. In many ways, having a morning newspaper subscription is as much a signal to someone of your age as whether or not you remember seeing the Beatles perform live on the Ed Sullivan Show.

I found myself thinking about this very same thing the other day as I was reading my New York Times. What I used to savor and really enjoy each morning I can now get through in less than 10 or 15 minutes. The front section is stuff that I have already seen and heard about without a lot of new analysis, I don’t read the sports section, and the business section is increasingly anemic. Even the Style section isn’t as interesting as it used to be. I still get the paper, mostly out of habit, but can’t say that I feel deprived if I miss it in the morning.

My other morning paper, The Wall Street Journal, seems to have at least gotten the fact that quality content needs to be delivered if they want to keep subscribers. Even though their content covers many of the same topics as the NYT, it offers new insights and analysis. And, now that the Journal has its Personal Journal section I can still get news related to dining, real estate, style and soon sports. The Wall Street Journal has now become my BFF.

So, as the New York Times, The Boston Globe, the LA Times and the Chicago Tribune whack jobs in the newsroom to reduce costs (and therefore the quality of their content), papers like the Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, Barrons, Investors Business Daily and others that seem to get what is needed in order to survive as a catalyst in the print news publishing industry – great content which attracts the right readers which in turn attracts advertisers – stand to profit. As I have said before, the newspaper industry needs to stop spending money on consultants who tell them what they want to hear and take a hard look at what they need to do to save themselves. The answer is likely to be one that causes them to dramatically shift their focus away from what they do today to a new model of aggregating and distributing content. It might not be what they want to hear, but it is something worth listening to. I wish they would before it is too late. For more thoughts on this, read our IDEAS article, “Tomorrow’s News Today: 5 Strategies for Survival”.