LESS journalists are reporting from Washington DC, and a higher percentage of those who remain are from specialist publications or websites, according to an AP story on the US National Public Radio site.
By Brett Taylor, PANPA
If you’re a trend junkie like us here at PANPA, this is an intriguing snapshot of consumer behaviour and the media’s response.
The article says the amount of political content being produce for ‘general interest’ media, such as mainstream newspapers, is on the decrease while niche brands such as Politico.com are rising to take their place for readers who have a specific interest in politics.
Theoretically, people who once bought a newspaper mainly for the political stories, with some news on the side, might now instead go straight to the dedicated political news sites, and catch the day’s other events online, on the radio or on TV later, wherever.
The same scenario is being mirrored in any number of topic areas. If a reader has a particular passion for golf, there are an increasing number of specialist websites he or she can visit that will supercede the coverage given to golf by your daily newspaper’s sports pages.
This is presents a challenge for mainstream newspapers, which (in terms of topic mix) are jacks of all trades and masters of none.
The solution isn’t to throw resources at every topic area, in an attempt to be the most comprehensive resource. That is too expensive, and someone focussing wholly on, say, entertainment news, is always going to do a better job at covering it than a newspaper that has the rest of the world to worry about.
The answer is to provide an experience for the reader that their favourite niche sites can’t match.
You must inform your reader of the day’s events, but package them in a way that can be consumed faster and understood easier, with a focus on the elements of a story that affect people’s lives.
You must set the news agenda to differentiate yourself from the myriad of other sources available. You must break news – exclusives are the ultimate differentiator.
You must build community within your readership. A reader should feel like they are participating in their society by picking up your paper, and contributing to the community by leaving you a comment online, or sending in a picture from their mobile phone.
Reading a blog written on the other side of the world might satisfy someone’s special interest area, but it can bring a certain sense of detachment from the real world. Picking up the local paper should be the opposite – it should connect a reader with the people around them.
You must make up for the lack of quantity of content on individual topics with quality. If you can’t have an army of science reporters to compete with www.newscientist.com, pay for a must-read columnist that will have the science nerds coming back every time. For a regional paper, this might hiring in the best mind on the local sports team.
And in the online space, you must branch out and connect with the very sites that might be taking your readers away. Network with popular blogs, don’t compete with them. A die-hard music fan will respect you more if you’re hooked in with the online community of music news. Link to other sites and aggregate the best music blogs and resources on the web. Be part of the movement.
Just as job ads and classifieds have shifted online, where they exist in an environment more convenient for the user, it gets easier by the day for people to bypass the newspaper package and go to dedicated sources for everything from weather, to cinema listings, to news about the environment. The newspaper product must be improved, and that product promoted loudly and clearly, if it is to remain a tool worth using.
