The Elite Newspaper of the Future

Spotted via Newspaper Deathwatch is this must-read piece from the American Journalism Review.

Philip Meyer, whose 2004 book The Vanishing Newspaper: Saving Journalism in the Information Age, is often credited as being the first to predict the newspaper industry’s demise, essentially says that newspaper's salvation lies in three things.

First of all in copying bloggers and building a community. Secondly in changing how they report news to be more focused on investigative reporting rather than a record of events. And thirdly to do less things, but to do them better, so you focus on an 'elite' audience of news junkies as opposed to trying to be all things to all people.

Meyer writes:

"Robert Picard, a media economist who looks at newspapers from an international perspective, believes that they try to do too much.

"He expressed this view in June at the Carnegie-Knight Task Force conference on the Future of Journalism at Harvard University. Newspapers "keep offering an all-you-can-eat buffet of content, and keep diminishing the quality of that content because their budgets are continually thinner," he said.

""This is an absurd choice because the audience least interested in news has already abandoned the newspaper.""

Newspapers should copy bloggers in establishing a dialogue with their readers and engaging them. But they can trump them as well by focusing on "evidence-based journalism, something that bloggers are not good at originating."

"Not all readers demand such quality, but the educated, opinion-leading, news-junkie core of the audience always will. They will insist on it as a defense against "persuasive communication," the euphemism for advertising, public relations and spin that exploits the confusion of information overload. Readers need and want to be equipped with truth-based defenses.

"Newspapers might have a chance if they can meet that need by holding on to the kind of content that gives them their natural community influence.

"To keep the resources for doing that, they will have to jettison the frivolous items in the content buffet."

Photo - John Thurm