Carolyn Jack

Editor and CEO, Geniocity.com
A project of The Genius Group LLC

Numbers won’t save newspapers

I’ve just read a discussion posted on the RJI News Collaboratory about how to make news gathering and publishing a profitable industry again. The cacophony of opinions was depressing, to say the least. Ironically, though, it simplified the whole issue for me. It also clarified my own strategy.

Here’s what I got: Nobody knows the answer, so you have to go with your gut.    

Not that the Collaboratory isn’t doing journalism a favor by trying to help the news industry get a fresh grip on itself. A project of the Donald W. Reynolds Journalism Institute at the University of Missouri, the Collaboratory was set up at the start of 2009 to encourage us web-based journalist-entrepreneurs in our efforts to innovate (and possibly save) the news business.

The profitability discussion is contained in Mark Poepsel’s blog coverage (go to the Collaboratory main page  and scroll down to the two RJI Liveblog postings. Read the bottom one first) of RJI’s May 18 Talkfest, at which news-biz experts – editorial people, financial people, marketing people, academics – went on about all kinds of brain-numbing stuff such as ad revenue, profit margins, business models and market reach.

I’m all for the scientific approach when it comes to analysis, but not so much when it comes to conclusions. My feeling is, fine, read all the stats and focus-group findings and then shut off the computations and stretch out with your feelings, Luke. News people aren’t  bean-counters – our strength lies in talking directly to enormous numbers of people and getting a sense, not just of the facts, but of the truth. We work at finding out about people, understanding them and fairly representing their stories.  

We are in many ways the community’s eyes, ears, voice and sense of itself. So now that the news business is in trouble, we’re going to discard  all that earned wisdom and rely on charts to tell us what to do?

Oh, hell no. The reason newspapers are dying today is because their leaders had already started relying on charts – and focus groups and number-crunchers – instead of on their own deeply experienced staffs, the ones in direct touch with the communities they serve. Newspapers went corporate. The heart and soul went out of them. Their execs listened to stockholders with a passion for money instead of reporters and editors with a passion for finding out what’s going on. And they ignored most of the great new tools available for telling those stories until their audiences and advertising evaporated.

It’s true in any business and especially in this one – the people who succeed will be the ones who listen to their own instincts and convictions, stay creative and flexible at all times and turn out an uncompromisingly great product that wows the public in a way it would never have thought to ask for in a market survey.

Because people can’t ask for what they can’t think up themselves. It’s up to any industry’s most creative people to imagine the future, make it happen and then blow consumers’ minds with it.  Passion and excellence sell. The same old stuff bores.

Newspapers got boring. And shortsighted.

Now the only way out is to do what we do best – tell important and fascinating stories – and do it even better than before by using every new technological advantage available to us. We may have to do it as individuals or small concerns. But when we once again make something we deeply and enthusiastically believe in, we can make people want it.

And when people want something, they’ll pay for it.