18 August 08

Where is the disconnect with media and audience

I’ve got issues with most of the established media in this country. Not only do I think there is an undercurrent of sexism and racism in almost every newsroom in this country (I’ll tell you why in a minute), but I think that media has gotten so fracking large that they’re just out of touch with their readers as people because they spend all their time listening to marketers.

I’m fortunate, blessed, lucky, etc. to live in a city with not one, but two large daily newspapers. It’s great, right? Kinda. There’s all this great news that happens in this city, but the vast majority of what gets covered in the local mainstream media is the same news hashed and rehashed. I’m firmly within the market that these newspapers should be pushing for, but you know what? I don’t have a subscription to either one.

I was the Editor in Chief of our daily student newspaper that just happened to be the fifth largest newspaper in the state of Ohio. For full disclosure, I didn’t really deserve this job. I wasn’t terribly well suited for it and there were gobs of people who could have done it better. But I got the job, and I honestly did my best, and I am well aware of every mistake I made while I was there. And if I had the chance to do it over again, I wouldn’t.

But the experience lived with me strongly for years and still has affected me and has affected how I think about the media. Its expensive to create news coverage, real news coverage. It costs a lot of money to pay someone a full salary for months and months to do one investigative piece. So, more often than not, that is one of the things that get cut when budgets get tightened. It’s a helluva lot cheaper and easier to write about Lindsay Britney Paris flashing their bits to media photographers than it is to “follow the money”.

And, frankly, I’m a little tired of news publications thinking that I care more about those flashy bits than I care about how names of undercover agents got exposed. (By the way, I LOVE the fact that Julia Childs was an undercover agent before she became a chef.) I’m tired of news publications assuming I don’t care that my alderman falls asleep in city council meetings (which he does by the way). I’m tired of news publications just not getting what I’m interested in.

Gone are the days of Royko here in Chicago. And, honestly, I don’t think that anyone should drown their troubles in alcohol, even if it makes the story easier to write. But along with his era, the belief that newspapers should serve their readers died. Not by the journalists (at least not most of them), but by the owners, the marketing experts, the focus group testers, the sales force. It’s a lot easier to get people to pick up free copies of The Red Whatever when there’s a picture of Britney Lindsay Paris with a black box over her crotch, than it is to get people to pick up a free copy with the headline “City Council Balances Budget”. But that’s because the articles about budgets are written in a way that loses the connection to the reader.

News publications need to get their brain trust to interact with the public in such a way as to attract and understand the public. It’s a lot harder for marketers to control this type of interaction, so its squelched for a more authoritarian view on everything from bank robberies to budgets.

But, I have hope that maybe, just maybe, one of the largest newspapers in Chicago is starting to understand that they need to reconnect with their audience as people, and not as a demographic. It starts with understanding what the public wants to know. The Chicago Tribune has created this persona called Colonel Tribune, or I assume that at least a few people at the paper have created the persona, I can’t give credit to the paper as a whole just yet. Colonel Tribune is loosely based off of Colonel McCormick, who was kind of an ass, but has a bit of a popular mystiqueish persona. Well, this cartoon Colonel has a Facebook and a Twitter representation (and possibly more, but since I’m just on those two networking sites, that’s where I see him). But here’s the thing. The Colonel “gets it”.

The Colonel is out there, accessible, making friends, shaking hands, befriending the webiverse. And what does that get him? It gets him messages from his readers saying things like “Hey there’s a whole bunch of scared people outside of Daley Center, any idea what’s up?” And because the Colonel is on the ball, a message gets sent to the appropriate desk who sends out a reporter who gets an article about how there was a bomb threat. And guess what? That scoop becomes a popular story of the day. The Colonel hears that a couple of banks in Chicago have gotten robbed and he sends out a message saying “Hey, you might want to stay out of banks today if you can, there’s been a few robberies.”

This approach is making the news relevant to the user. And yes, these are both fairly trivial stories. But the support system is being set and grown and fostered so that in case, or actually when, a larger and harder to cover quickly story happens, the Twitterverse has Colonel Tribune’s back. And if your readers can easily tell you what is going on in town, then they’re more likely to do so.

Have you tried sending an idea for a story (not necessarily a press release) to a reporter at the Tribune or the Sun-Times? It’s really hard, unless you know a reporters personal email address. Why would a newspaper do this? Why would it make it hard for people to interact with beat reporters? I know why. Its because there are so few of them they don’t have time to get their work done, their stories written, and talk to the public. And they probably shouldn’t have to talk to the public so they can stay focused and have time to write better stories. But, someone like Colonel Tribune, whose job it is apparently to send out headlines to the Twitterverse can be there talking to people, can serve as a filter and keep the guys in aluminum foil hats from soaking up the time of exhausted beat reporters while passing on tidbits of information to the right desk.

And all I can do, is hope that the marketing departments, the sales people, the bean counters of the media world understand that at this point “You have nothing to lose, cause you’re just about to lose it all!” and they not only permit their reporters to get in the public’s eye, but they encourage it. Only time will tell, but the time of the large media organizations is ticking away pretty quickly.

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