NamedPipe

Two things converged for me this week about newspaper leadership. First, I ran across a very old article about concerns of newspaper executives circa 1996. Next I read Byron Calame’s Public Editor column in the Sunday New York Times about what the Times’ editors know about their readers. The article about newspaper executive concerns has this:

The second most commonly voiced need is for understanding broad marketing principles and market forces affecting their newspaper or corporation. Half of all publishers and CEOs select this from a list of nine management areas. The top concern, with 55% naming it, involves efficient use of current technological resources.

Publishers don’t know who their audience is and they think marketing can help them figure that out (note, this article is written by a market researcher). But traditional product marketing doesn’t work at newspapers – at least not with respect to subscribers. Subscribers are looking to newspapers to be better and more compelling – and those are things that come from taking risks, not market research. Now contrast this with what the editor of the New York Times Magazine thinks about his readers:

"I imagine my reader is a late-thirties-something woman, a lawyer or educator or businesswoman. She’s busy with work, and also with family matters, but Sunday morning is a time she’ll allow herself to read something that is not work related, or kids’ homework related. She’s got 45 minutes, an hour. She wants to lose herself in a story, one big story – 8,000, 9,000 words. My hunch is she wants to read not something escapist but something substantive – something that holds a mirror up to her own life or opens a window onto a pretty troubled world."

The point is, you’re not going to get happy readers unless you can do what the editor of the NYT Magazine did – paint a picture of who the reader is. Newspapers have gotten so far removed from their readers that they need market research firms to tell them who buys their paper. Some of the success of blogs has been due to their more personal connection with readers – something newspapers just don’t get anymore.