What Newspapers And Paranoid-Schizo Street Preachers Screaming At An Invisible Audience Have In Common
Amidst all this pontificating about how important it is to use your own judgment, stick to your guns, ignore the critics and practice cod liver oil journalism (tastes shitty, but it’s good for you), please allow me to totally confuse you by now advocating pretty much the direct opposite: give the readers what they want.
At the risk of sounding like I should be having some crystal healer put chucks of quartzite on my face, what I’m advocating is something akin to journalistic Taoism (the whole yin/yang thing that the cosmos is and should a harmonious balance between equal and opposite forces). Thus, on the one hand, you have the idea that the path to success lies in trusting your readers to follow you when you tilt at windmills. That you should have the respect for them to disagree, to make your judgments that something is important, and damn the consequences, shove it in their faces.
The opposite of that, of course is what this segment is about – knowing your readers, knowing what it is that they need and are interested in, and then giving that thing to them.
If you’re not relevant to your readers, you might as well be the aromatic guy jumping up and down on the bus bench explaining the Trilateral Commission and the Illuminati to his socks. People will ignore you the same way they ignore loud and obnoxious idiots. In New Media terms, the way that they ignore blogs that are dense, angry, unpleasant screeds that are all about one person’s obsessions and to hell with the rest of the world. I mean, come on, be honest – if you’ve waded through the flotsam and jetsam of weblogs, you find yourself wondering if these peoples’ DSL lines came with their own one-size-fits-all tinfoil hat.
Once again, Mitchell’s example in Point Reyes is illuminating. While on the one hand he defies the public tastes and often infuriates people by taking a contrarian stance, he is also so deeply immersed in what his community wants and needs that his news judgment on their behalf is reflexive. If you ask him why a story is important or why something should be followed up on, he just gives you a blank look. The concerns of Point Reyes are the water he swims in – and that he makes his staff swim in as well.
One of Mitchells’ requirements is that his reporters live in the community – which can be a bit of a hardship because it’s so expensive in West Marin. But he insists, because so many of your stories will come from just listening to people in the check-out aisle, or having to go to the Post Office. Many journalists for metro papers are covering communities that they don’t live in – and wouldn’t be caught in after dark. It’s only for rare project stories and special Pulitzer-bait stuff that you see journalists moving to and living in Da Hood. In fact many dailies wouldn’t allow their reporters to cover the neighborhood in which they live because they’d be afraid of the conflict of interest.
“A successful newspaper covers the hell out of that tiny little coverage area that it has marked out as its own,” Mitchell said. “So, I think it’s just focus, focus, focus on your own back yard. That’s really the secret.
“Local, local, local.”
Cauthorn pointed out that the most of the disconnect between newspapers and their audience has happened because “the practice of modern journalism at anything from a mid-size market up, takes place over the telephone.
“If you have your ass on the street where it belongs, you don’t need a focus group. Simple as that.
“And the reality is that Point Reyes proves it. Of course your instincts are right if you’re aligned with your readers. And if you’re aligned with your readers, your circulation grows.
“Simple as that.”
This has some important implications for the on-line world, where the name of the game is to try to find a niche in which you can prosper. As broadband penetration spreads, as more and more cities start creating wide wireless web zones to attract businesses, national and international news will arrive via the web.
"National news? Piece of cake. Anywhere, everywhere. I can get pope coverage pretty much anywhere," said Mark Potts, one of the founders of the all-local citizen journalist startup, Backfence.
Potts and his investors are betting that as local businesses grow more accustomed to the web, as more people rely on it for information, there will be a crucial gap opening up that they can fill. A site that tells you how to find a good local plumber, what the Little League schedule is, and what the City Council is doing to try to solve the traffic problem could be a real force. Thus, start-up ultra-local sites could find themselves duking it out with weekly newspapers like the Light.
Mitchell professes himself to be unconcerned with online news making his paper obsolete, since he and other weeklies inhabit a very specialized niche in the journalistic ecosystem, one where their relevance to their audience has immunized them from the “web threat” that has the MSM in such a tizzy.
“I don’t think a weekly newspaper has the same problems that the metros have with on-line news coverage,” Mitchell said. “Basically, what the metros are worried about is that on-line advertising will take away their advertising. I question the value of some on-line advertising, but some of it obviously is good.
“The weekly however, is covering its own community … and if we’re covering them intensely, even the dailies can’t keep up with us. Certainly no web site could possibly cover the amount that we cover.
“I think we come in under the radar. I think we’re just too small for someone else to try to do what we’re doing. There’s probably close to 10,000 other little papers doing the same thing. So we really may be more the trend of the future than the dailies or anyone else.
“Network television certainly is having a hard time right now. I get the impression that a lot of the newsmagazines are having a lot of trouble. So here alone are the weeklies picking up circulation. I mean, that tells you something – the public needs us.
“The weeklies keep a narrow enough focus that they don’t try to be all things to all people. They are the opposite of the USA Today.”
A weekly writ of mandamus – A big part of the watchdog function of the press is to make sure that the government is living up to its responsibilities.
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Local, local, local – Weekly papers survive by “covering the hell out of” the little patch of turf that they’ve marked out as their own. .
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It’s right here that it’s felt – Policies that are shaped in the abstract by politicians in far-off capitols have direct and dramatic real-world impact on the local scene. It is the local media’s job to explain what has happened (or is about to happen) and why.
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