Newspapers just don’t listen

“I’m embarassed to say this,” the 30-something working mom told the focus group. “But as I’m pushing the kids out the door in the morning, I see that newspaper all wrapped in plastic and I pick it up and set it on the pile of other newspapers wrapped in plastic in the hallway. Eventually, I just scoop them all up and put them in the recycling.”

She was paying good money for a product she didn’t use — and getting guilt-tripped in the process. She wouldn’t be a subscriber for much longer. Nor would many of the Baby Boomers we were talking to in the summer of 1990 as part of Knight Ridder’s 25/43 Project (named for the age range of Baby Boomers at the time). We were using focus groups to learn the stories behind the plunging circulation numbers. Watching through one-way glass as these readers, non-readers, and soon-to-be-non-readers talked about the Boca Raton News — my pride and joy — was startlingly insightful. These folks thought they had us figured out (“They don’t run the whole story on one page  because they want you to thumb through the ads”). They truly wanted to be informed, but they weren’t getting what they wanted from the local paper. News magazines sometimes. TV news most nights. Nearly all said they read so much work-related stuff that they just didn’t have time to devote to a newspaper.

We were competing for people’s time. We tried to be more relevant, creating a beat structure that focused on topics such as the environment, family and career, safety and security. We tried to be more succinct, eliminating jumps, converting information into graphics and devising ways to make stories more scannable and less linear. We even worked out a deal with Dominos that got you a paper along with your pizza (thinking, I guess, that the stale morning paper would go great with the fresh evening dinner). And always we went back to the focus groups to see how it was working. The News was making a stir in the community and circulation did grow. But the focus groups and the tinkering ended when the Knight Ridder project expired in 2002 (after two years and $2 million). I and the other carpetbaggers left town to take our tricks to other papers around the country.

So I read that the News folded the other day. The blogger writing the obituary sneered at the 25/43 Project’s focus groups. It figures. Newsrooms are notoriously deaf to their readers. Any other business selling a product uses focus groups and customer panels to find the tripwires that push people to buy. Not newspapers. The editors instinctively know what interests the average reader, even though they spend nearly every waking hour talking with un-average people (themselves, politicians, narcisitic celebrities, themselves, axe-grinders, themselves ….) It’s the reader’s fault if they quit consuming the content that they have deemed to be news. It’s TV’s fault for making them have to dumb-down the news. It’s the Internet’s fault for giving away news.

Newsies, listen to the reader. They still don’t have time to wade through your inverted pyramids and sterile storytelling. Their lives are more affected by bicycle thefts than by gang shootings. Their opinions are much more nuanced than the whack jobs who get dutifully quoted on each side of the shouting line. They do take in a lot of information, either written or multi-media. They’re not as dumb as you think.

You just need to figure out how to meet them where they are. That means you have to listen to them.