Ggigaoma Matthew Ingram reporting:
...Many media companies and publishers do occasional customer surveys or
focus groups. But these tend to be primarily marketing exercises, and
ultimately just reinforce existing design and content decisions that
have already been made by editors. For the most part, such organizations
see their job as coming up with great ideas and producing great content
— a process that usually takes place with zero input from readers — and
then delivering that content on a variety of platforms. In effect, a
one-way relationship.
Even the
NYT’s innovation report,
as valuable as it is, makes it clear that as far as the newspaper is
concerned, the web and social media tools are useful primarily because
they are new ways of distributing and promoting all that great content
its journalists produce, not because they change anything about the
journalist-reader dynamic or allow journalism to occur in new ways.
...n order to do that properly, you have to experiment, and iterate
rapidly, and most of all use data to watch what your users (or readers,
or customers, whatever you choose to call them) are doing with your
product.
Take Snow Fall as a cautionary example — the
wonderfully designed, wildly popular multimedia project the
New York Times
released in 2012 about the aftermath of an avalanche. It was obvious
that dozens of designers and developers and writers and editors had
spent thousands of hours on the article, and it showed. It was
beautiful. But according to
comments made recently by former NYT digital strategist Aron Pilhofer — now director of digital at
The Guardian — despite the massive investment of resources, the newspaper had no analytics attached to the project.
...
How do you make that kind of cultural change within a traditional media organization? I don’t really know, but
appointing half a dozen longtime
newspaper insiders to senior jobs, as the NYT’s new executive editor
recently did, doesn’t seem like a great start to me, to be brutally
honest.
There are some hints of evolution even at the
Times: apps like NYT Now are an attempt to do things somewhat differently, and even incremental efforts like
putting links to other websites
on the front page — a top-secret project that no doubt took months to
plan and approve — are worthwhile steps, tiny as they may be. Cultures
don’t change overnight. But the clock is ticking, and more flexible
players like Quartz and BuzzFeed have a head start.
https://gigaom.com/2014/09/25/one-secret-to-the-success-of-quartz-buzzfeed-and-gawker-they-look-at-news-as-a-service/
