Home delivery of my paper failed the other day. IrksomeI got to thinking about people who never take the paper at all. They have 100 percent satisfaction with their subscription option. Why can’t I, since I’m a paying customer?
It’s not that newspaper companies don’t know what the non-paying public wants. Believe me. There’ve been lots and lots of studies, especially of the young.
News consumers want information on demand. That means delivery on their schedule, not the distributor’s.
They want portability. Don’t send news to their physical home. Send it to their online home, which may be in a pocket or purse.
They want to make their own news decisions. So let them select and tailor the choices of news topics feeding to them.
They want only what they want. They don’t want my experience of letting unwanted, unread sections of the news product fall to the floor while I look for something else.
They want news they can use. They probably don’t listen to opera but perhaps to rap or salsa. They may not read musty Russian novels but might check out current hot fiction. So there’s no point lecturing them into reading long, dry policy analysis that goes “on the one hand this and on the other hand that.”
They want fairness, transparency and accountability. They don’t want or need claims of objectivity, which they consider phony anyway. Everyone has an opinion, a slant, a viewpoint. Just give the other side, state yours and tell who your sources are – be fair, lucid and answerable.
They are not hung up on race, gender and social class issues. It’s not that they are rebels or “libruls” or freethinkers in the old sense. They’ve just moved on from those issues and hang-ups. So news stories and news figures playing to a divided nation seem irrelevant.
They want to feel their news organization is on their side. A certain insurance company must have read the same research – you know, “Nationwide is on your side.” It doesn’t have to be blatant, out-and-out advocacy. A sense of identification between provider and user of news will suffice.
They also want to stay connected through instant messaging or with a cool Web app that reports where friends are located at any moment or with social networks or with sites that store and exchange photos and videos. (Don’t like what you see? Don’t look). Much of their current events information and personal entertainment come person-to-person from the buzz of their friends.
Oh, and did I mention they want their news package to be free? A few Google type ads are okay, but no glaring flash or pop-ups. And no registration fees or rigmarole to get online; the view still prevails that anything on the Internet should be free for the taking.
These ideas run rampant through the information industry. A good access point I've tapped several times are the We Media showcase-seminars of iFOCUS, founded and run by Andrew Nachison and Dale Peskin. http://ifocos.org/about/
But now here’s a weird contradiction. This target group of news consumers who shun paid print subscriptions will spend money on technology. The cooler the better, like an iPod.
Or Apple’s iPhone and its clones – the smart devices that are camera, PDA, mobile computer, music and video player, game board and, oh, well, if you must, use it as a phone too.
If you want to wager on what media platform will carry information in the future, bet on the phone.
Whoa! Why, see here! What’s this I find in my own pocket? As I live and breathe, I believe it’s my personal cellular communicator, my new Apple iPhone. Scotty’s dead, but beam me up, anyone.
Does that mean I am “they” at my age? No. It means the culture is merging with the counterculture, which points to the future of media.
I sympathize with all those content characteristics of the young and the restless, although I am not one. Well, maybe I get a little restless now and then.
I even believe the old-style publishers have only themselves to blame for the traits of their customers and the ones they wish they had.
Newspapers trained us to be idiosyncratic readers. And, er, non-readers. They prepped us for the Web with all its own peculiar crazy quiltness. The difference is you had to buy everything the publisher printed, like it or not. But the Web browser points only where the surfer wants to go at the speed and in the manner of his or her own choosing, depending on broad band access.
Before there was an electronic smorgasbord of topics the user chooses, we had newsprint cafeterias. But we couldn’t just call up what we wanted. We had to slog through coverage of events, sports, features, business, advice, service information, celebrity gossip, politics, trivia, games, cartoons, truss ads, opinion and all the other cover-to-cover glory and inanity that comprise what’s starting to project deadly quaintness – a newspaper.
Americana and something our parents and grandparents cared more about than we do isn’t cool.
The newspaper experience even yet speaks warmly and wistfully of home.
But not when the carrier doesn’t come.
Besides, home is anytime and anyplace I get my IM or meet a friend on Facebook or download from iTunes on my iPhone.
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