Monday, October 19, 2015
If you build it, they may not come
After reading this week's articles, I couldn't help but wonder why the legacy newspapers don't listen to their customer bases more? As Chyi (2015) points out, "if digital natives are prone to news in digital formats, they should have dropped the print edition of their campus newspaper by 2011. However, results collected through a national survey of nearly 200 U.S. college newspaper advisers indicated that the print edition reached nearly twice as many readers as the Web edition on a given day." I think this example is indicative of newspapers not learning from their loyal readership.
On the other hand the digital native publications don't have to play by the same rules. They don't have long-standing guilds (though some now have unions) to factor in to their plans or print operations. They were made specifically for the web and have more or less mastered the art of making money on digital content: Make a lot of stuff, make it cheap, and blur the lines between your content and the advertisements. And of course, make sense of your analytics, more specifically what your customers are demanding.
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Your question reminded me of these interesting question a media columnist asked me just a few days ago:
ReplyDeleteA question in search of an oversimplified answer: what’s the condensed/dummies guide reason that publishers have struggled so badly with the internet, is it a failure to understand their own product, groupthink, wishful thinking?
Is there some sort of online Stockholm Syndrome going on? How have publishers bought into the internet en masse? Did the recession exacerbate this?
Have publishers been blindsided by new online distributors (Apple has its new News app that makes content pretty and offers a rev share, same with Facebook Instant Articles, and Twitter’s new moments mean that readers don’t have to click through to publishers’ sites). Can you describe how newspaper firms’ managerial decisions have ceded the power to these - and more traditional - online aggregators like Yahoo News?