The Modern Journalist

Tribune Publisher: The Model is Broken

The publisher of the Tribune Company sent out a memo to his staff that said, in short, the current newspaper model is broken, it doesn’t serve the readers and the industry needs to rethink itself.

Sam Zell, the man behind the memo, isn’t a journalist. He’s a billionaire investor. He’s not tied to any particular model of journalism, but he is — one would suspect — tied to making money. And his analysis of the industry is that unless there is a radical change in the industry, newspapers will not only be irrelevant, they will be gone. On top of that his message is that people primarily want localized data, lists and information that is relevant to their lives in the community and mapped to help visualize.

First, our publishing business — and to reiterate, it IS a business — needs to retool itself to a customer-centric model. We have now reviewed dozens of reader studies done by Tribune over the years, and they present clear and consistent findings. Readers want:

• Unbiased, honest journalism
• LOCAL consumer and community news
• Maps, graphics, lists, ranking and stats

The memo is quite interesting to read, but what’s so interesting to me is it feels like the industry is reaching a tipping point, a moment where the traditional journalists and managers are starting to face the reality that the business is about to radically change.

More and more I’m seeing articles like this, which extol the virtues of technology companies — in this case Google — and their ability to easy find and display information at a moment’s notice.

I’ve argued often that the best site on the Web is Google for these reasons:

1. The site is rarely, if ever, down
2. Users instantly know how the site works
3. The site nearly flawlessly delivers information that you want in a flat manner
4. The page loads near instantaneously

The hallmark of great design is design that is completely transparent. As Karp argues in the article I linked after the jump, it makes no difference how “great” content is if newspapers bury it where nobody can find it. By definition in a Web world, the content is not great.

Too many journalists (and this happened with the tech companies I covered as well) blame the users for their inability to find and user their stories. (”Yeah, we wrote about that last year.” Well, who cares, I want to know what happened today.) In fact, it’s quite common for designers and producers to blame their users. It’s not inherent to journalism, but that’s the industry I’m dealing with.

And it’s not good because technology companies are — and I’ll bet a steak on this — hiring better quality and qualified programmers and designers as a whole than most newspapers. The shift towards a modern news organization requires the business model to be blown up and rethought.

Can traditional news outlets do that? Sure. It’s not landing on the moon. Will they do that? So far, I haven’t seen much evidence that they are truly rethinking the model. They are replicating a print system in a digital world instead of conceiving a digital world.

I’m not sure that I buy Steve Ballmer’s argument that all print will disappear within ten years, but I can almost promise that more Americans will get their news and information delivered across IP networks to hardware devices and not from print.

Even if you don’t buy my premise that the industry is going to operate differently from the journalists perspective (although you should, because I’m right), the business end of the model has to — by definition — change.