What’s Driving Newspapers ?
A few month back I read an article from the Huffington Post, about people’s perception of climate change, and its causes. It states that:
“a […] troubling metric from Yale’s latest poll suggests that only 42 percent of Americans believe that scientists are in agreement on climate change”
But researchers went on and analysed the abstracts of about 12,000 scientific articles to determine if any kind of consensus existed when analyzing whether climate change could be caused by humans. And the answer is unequivocal:
of 4,000 abstracts that had anything to say about human-driven climate change, 97 percent endorsed the notion. A little less than 3 percent either rejected the idea or remained undecided
I don’t know what really drives journalists as individuals, because a/ they come in all shapes and sizes, and b/ whenever you ask them, they sure as hell tell you about their independence and core principles and methodologies for market research, fact-checking, fairness, truthfulness…
But what we are witnessing here is plain and pure disconnect between facts and public perception, on a massive scale.
If I start pointing fingers at individual journalists here, I’ll probably just get buried under a barrage of mostly irrelevant anecdotes, or digressions about the exemplarity of war journalists, so let’s ask a fairer and more global question : “what’s driving newspapers?”
It’s the business model, stupid!
Most newspapers rely heavily, if not exclusively on advertising, and most newspapers get their advertising money from people who want to sell you food, cars, movies and video games, and take you to their fast-food restaurants. And like it or not, to sell most of these products, it’s in the advertisers’ best interest to first “dumb you down”.
While it’s been a problem for quite a while, the sensational headlines and “faits divers” drove revenue that helped pay for expensive, quality pieces.
But as Seth Godin puts it: “The problem with the race to the bottom is that you might win. You might make a few more bucks for now, but not for long and not with pride. Someone will always find a way to be cheaper or more brutal than you”
So the dumbing down kept on going for quite a while, and just as some started suggesting we’d gone too far, the internet stroke! And no one in the media industries expected the brutality of it and the dramatic shift of viewer/readership and advertising revenue that followed.
Play a different game ?
Every traditional media outlet must rethink their whole model, and a good starting point is probably to re-establish their purpose, and build on that, instead of focusing on the tools (Twitter, tablets, software) and the competition (Buzzfeed, Vice, bloggers)
Rupert Murdoch, who’s been proactively and voluntarily racing to the bottom for a long time — and gotten quite good at it — understands it quite well. Like many others, he’s blaming Google for the disruption, because it’s easy and practical, but he’s also gearing up, turning his companies around to be more efficient and fight a better battle. And most of all, he’s seriously investing in probably one the most efficient new players out there: Vice.
On the other end, I heard Dick Stephenson, just last week, explain that the New York Times is trying to move away from advertising as a revenue source toward more subscription.
Racing to the top instead of racing to the bottom? I like the sound of that, and will therefore close this post with a little extra Seth Godin (from the same post):
