The Modern Journalist

We Built It and Nobody Came. Stupid Nobodies.

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Rick Edmonds has a post at Poynter discussing the decline of print readers and the slow adoption of online readers at newspapers.

The contention is that online will not grow enough for some time — maybe ten years — to replace the readership that has left. There are some half-hearted attempts at analyzing what this means: maybe advertisers will want to reach readers who both read online and offline, maybe this online world isn’t something that should be focused on until the market matures.

Either way, the analysis misses the point. It once again tries to template traditional thinking onto a modern environment.

I’ve finally honed my talk to the point where we start at the beginning. The first 15-20 minutes take people through a brief history of technology: how it was developed, why it was developed, what the developers were thinking.

You can’t make rational assumptions about the future without understanding why the world operates the way it does.

Here’s what I mean.

The brief history of technology (as we **PIMP ALERT** wrote in our book — after Steven Levy did it Hackers) is that of programmers building Tools to make Tools.

IOW, Dreamweaver is a tool that allows you to build a website without knowing code; widgets are tools that allow you to create “interactivity”
without knowing how to hit a database.

The smart news companies will build tools and databases both for themselves and for their readers.

When I see any story that decries the declining online numbers for 200 newspapers, I think: DUH!

Of course you’ll see declining numbers in print and slow adoption online. Two reasons:

The first, your numbers grew artificially because more people came online.

It wasn’t that you were doing anything right (necessarily, although maybe you were), it’s that there was a bigger audience to stumble upon you. That is naturally going to slow down.

Which means you need to begin to recruit those who passed you over the first time.

The second, you haven’t embraced the interactive web mindset that a majority of the “early” web adopters now take for granted. If message boards and Flash maps are all you have, of course you’re bound to fail. In an RSS world, that don’t cut it.

I think the most obvious reason for the decline and slowdown is that newspapers haven’t adapted to the ways in which people consume media.

In a Google/RSS world, stories are less important that on-demand information. Stories are the icing on the cake, the contextual piece that enhances information.

It is not the most important aspect of media.

Journalists don’t like to think that their words, their opinions and their ideas aren’t the most important thing. How do I know? I have seen the utter disdain for new technologies, the contempt for readers (particularly their reaction to what reporters write) and attitude towards the intelligence of the crowd.

Of course there will be a decline and slowdown.

We aren’t seeing that same decline and slowdown in the world of technology. Social media sites, blogs, listservs, communities, ect are all — in total — growing exponentially.

So either the journalists have it wrong or the rest of the world does.