We need real change and new products, not tinkering or mere promotion

(Here's something I posted to a mailing list. It's a tangent from discussion of low newspaper website traffic on Sundays.)

Newspaper readership has been declining steadily since 1970. Confronted with the Internet, newspapers generally have responded by creating "online newspapers," transporting a failing product model from dead trees to electrons.

The result has been a small shift from print to online and a large amount of crowing about "growing the audience" based on poor analysis of flawed data. The reality is that the genuine share of the market's attention continues to decline at an alarming pace.

Meanwhile, the "audience" is finding activities on the Web (but generally not on newspaper sites). Activities have to do with action and participation, not mere consumption.

These activities include meeting and conversing with with other people (not "rants and raves" but actual constructive conversation), photo and video sharing, blogging and other forms of self-publishing, games, and the pure joy of discovery that comes from exploring interesting and unknown territories on the net.

Newspapers -- online and off -- continue to be built around an assumption that there is a great unmet demand for news.

The reality is that people are drowning in news; it follows them around on radios and screens in cars, bars, stores, airports, even into elevators.

Increasingly, people say they don't seek news because they don't need to seek news -- if it's important, the news will come to them.

Sunday is a day when most people spend a great deal of time and energy away from the computer, engaged in personal and family interactions and amusement. Very little of the remaining time is spent consuming news.

There is troubling readership data on Sunday newspapers. Readership, both of the content and the preprinted inserts that dominate American Sunday newspapers, is plummeting. This inevitably will lead to a collapse of circulation -- not immediately, because people are slow to take actions such as canceling a subscription, but it's coming.

Anyone, especially any editor, who says "we're doing all right" needs to step down.

It is long past time for a hard reconsideration of the basic product line -- followed by genuine change, not merely statements of good intentions (i.e. the "experience newspaper").

Genuine change needs to be built around thoughtful consideration of human needs. This is not a matter of tinkering with the existing product line and looking for ways to persuade more people to consume the existing content.

Here are two examples of human needs.

• In a big-city market, large numbers of people ride public transportation systems from suburbs. While on the subway they want to occupy their time constructively. What product, or products, would you offer them? They could be on paper or electronic (think iPod).
• Great numbers of women of childrearing age are now in the workplace. Many of them are not from your town, but moved there in the last several years. They lack broad, dependable support networks to help when a kid gets sick, when Mom gets stuck in traffic and can't get home, et cetera. What can you do to help them? (Think about facilitating social networks and microcommunities).

Back when I was at the Star Tribune in the 1990s, publisher Joel Kramer came up with a mission statement that referred to "enhancing the shared life of the community."

The problem with mission statements is that most people think they're slogans. They're supposed to be prescriptions. If you take that prescription seriously you're going to be looking for new ways to do it, and developing radically new products.

We have to stop thinking of print as our core business. Our core business is bringing buyers and sellers together in local marketplaces. With that in mind, new products are a way of growing the core.

I do not believe that developing radically new products constitutes an abandonment of news. People expect news to come to them, and if we construct our products well, and connect them effectively, those products will be new conduits for news about public and civic affairs, even if they might be focused on personal needs.