Niemanlabs reporting 11.3.2011:
...Here, Pablo talks about a series of studies he’s done looking at the
gap between the kind of journalism that news organizations produce and
the kind of journalism that consumers consume. He’s gathered data from a
number of different countries and time periods to see how those
interests match up (or don’t). I think we found a few interesting points
of disagreement — it’s worth a listen.
I’ve posted a transcript below of both Pablo’s comments and my own
(but omitting the very interesting Q&A which followed, which is also
worth a listen). For anyone wanting to skip ahead, Pablo’s talk begins
at 7:50 in; my response starts at 37:10; the Q&A begins at 57:45.
(And if anyone wants an MP3 version for their morning commute, here’s the link.)
... So this book — News at Work, as Jason just said, is a story
about the increasing role of imitation or copying or replication in news
production — the idea that more and more and more, we have the same
news across different outlets...
actually there is a huge mismatch, as I say here, between the supply of information and the demand of information.
Basically, that means that the stories that news organizations
consider to be the most newsworthy ones, the most important ones at any
given point in time for any day or hour — the stories that are above the
fold in print newspapers, or at the top of the hour in the television
newscasts, or that they are in the top screen of the website — those
stories that are the most important ones for them are not necessarily
the stories that consumers consider to be the most important ones.
And this ties back to a long-standing debate between journalists and
scholars about the stories that journalists say we need in order to
function properly in a liberal democratic tradition, as citizens of the
polity — information about national news, international news, business,
economics, et cetera — versus the stories that often times we want to
read, that are stories usually about sports, crime, or entertainment —
that are not necessarily uninteresting or unimportant stories...
...So basically, just to summarize a lot of interviews, people consider
political news or public affairs news anxiety-provoking, demanding a lot
of cognitive effort. And they feel somewhat unprepared to interpret it.
All of that moves them away from this information. So we have two very
different cultures and two very different logics here...
...
Third, the Washington Post finding is, in part, an interesting one
for me, the reverse nature of the gap, because it tells us that the
niche sites, the sites that have a specialty, are siphoning interest
from the generalist sites. People who are in St. Louis or people who are
in Seattle who are interested in politics go to Politico or the
Washington Post — they don’t go to their local news organization.
So the bundled product strategy, the generalist strategy that
dominated the industry for a long while, actually might no longer be so
feasible.
http://www.niemanlab.org/2011/03/pablo-boczkowski-the-gap-between-what-reporters-write-and-readers-read-threatens-news-orgs-future/
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