The Modern Journalist

A Desktop Home for News Organizations

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Newspapers have a reader problem. And they have a Reader problem.

It’s no secret that news organizations face declining readerships, prompting layoffs and corporate restructuring. For many in the industry, the end must seem near.

But it’s never the pitfall you expect that gets you. You’re prepared for those and with enough smart people — and a management staff willing to listen — there aren’t many problems that can be solved. Not go all Rumsfeld-speak on you, but the real problem is the Unknown Unknowns.

And that’s the Reader problem.

News organizations need to quickly figure out how they are going to collect and display information. They need to be on the front lines of experimentation. They need to look to untether their data, restructure how they tell stories, integrate new Web-based products and learn how to work together.

It’s the last part that I’ve been chewing on for the past month. I’m not sure it’s entirely a fleshed out idea either.

This notion hit me, though, when I wrote my first article about Adobe Air, the software application that enables developers to create desktop applications that strip away corporate design while allowing users to interact with content even when they aren’t connected to the Web.

I’m not sure how the major news organizations could do this, but somehow, they need to figure out a set of protocols for delivering information that can be turned into a universal API kit. The reason: building an interconnected resource for the news.

In the past, news organizations have tried to build their own systems, thinking much like technology companies believing they can create the proprietary system that everyone will use. Occasionally that works. Most of the time, it doesn’t. Particularly in the news field.

For the most part, the more ubiquitous the service, the more open it needs to be. Since news organizations are not in the technology business, their best bet is to create their own Air-like mobile and desktop service where users are free to create their own papers from feeds everywhere.

These types of services could be built into existing pages. For instance, my local paper the Cincinnati Enquirer could have a universal widget where I can set up feeds from any paper in the country. I’d see headlines and such, but when I clicked, it would open a new window with that story at the original paper.

In other words, every newspaper would be an RSS Reader unto itself complete with content from other places. For local markets, this would introduce Readers to the population before they become so commonplace that people completely bypass the local paper for a majority of their news.

This is the newspaper-as-aggregation service. Otherwise, local organizations are going to be competing with everyone without the benefit of a brand that may keep readers loyal.