What do people want of their local news provider? News? If so, what kind of news? Sport? For sure. Comment? Maybe. Entertainment? Certainly. Information? Of course. Wedding pictures? Baby pictures?
In days of yore, when there was only newsprint, editors tended to guess what their audiences wanted. Although high circulations implied that intuition worked, how could editors ever be sure?
Now, with online readers far outnumbering print readers, the clicks are altogether more revealing, providing a reliable source of knowledge about readers’ desires.
Look around at the digital news initiatives that are making the weather in 2017. The Washington Post (prime competitor to the Times) is launching the Lily – a quite separate site of Post news re-edited for female millennial consumption, intentionally young, not old. The founders of Politico have just launched Axios, a site that gives you the news at pace (and added depth as required). And, of course, there’s the massive Mail Online, which is nothing like the Mail on a newsstand. In short, you need an angle, a particular selling point: you don’t need the full legacy treatment.
A new report from the Reuters Institute on media upheavals in 2017 predicts more print papers will follow the Independent and go online only.
Media advertising needs “new skills, talents, technologies and substantial fresh investment”, according to Mark Thompson, once BBC director general, now New York Times boss: a man to bring two worlds together. But as Thompson charts this future with its “unified approach” in his essay for Last Words, a comprehensive series of such examinations from Abramis published last week, does he ever think that equally different imperatives apply for the stuff that runs between the ads? The stuff we call news.
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