Maybe it's because Amy Gahran is a freelancer and doesn't work in a cubicle farm that she so precisely nails a major problem for today's newspapers:
"...it burns me up that news organizations continue to cut qualified journalists from their payrolls, ostensibly to control costs, while routinely leaving significant money on the table in the form of poorly sold and grossly underutilized online and mobile advertising opportunities. Then, in a Kafkaesque twist, management and journalists alike often whine about how their sites don't make much money."
and:
"The problem is, of course, that the ad staffs at most online news organizations don't have a clue about how to work well with online ad networks, especially matching niche-style networks to specialized content —such as, say, environmental news and features."
When she made this pitch during a Society of Environmental Journalists panel about the future of journalism, she says, other journalists got upset at the notion of content and ads having any connection.
But look at current newspapers: They're chock full of special sections—Home, Cars, Entertainment—that exist largely as ad attractors. The one section without this ad combo is news. The current newspaper ad model makes an orphan of news. No "natural" ads and, so, the constant trimming of the news budget to, as publishers are fond of saying "better align costs with revenues."
As Gahran suggests, it doesn't have to be this way.
Without some changes, newsrooms are locked in a budgetary death spiral. One of the problems is that too many journalists still seem to regard news as a civic duty rather than anything of real interest to readers. Call it the cod-liver-oil news model: News is good for you and if you don't eat it and like it, you'll die from rickets and ignorance—and you'll deserve it!
Follow this logic far enough and you wind up where any suggestion that readers might read various news stories because they actually are interested seems like cheating. Fact is, as Google knows all too well, it's entirely possible to pair up ads with news about almost anything.
But this remains an alien—and deeply mistrusted—business model. Given the smashed state of newspapers' current business model, you'd think reporters would embrace a new approach. That they don't, unfortunately, helps keep the old ad dinosaurs in the driver's seat—even as the wheels fall off.
One final irony: polls consistently show that reader interest in the environment is greater than that of most reporters and editors. You sure can't sell ads linked to stories you don't cover, or cover grudgingly.
(Via Gahran's blog on the 2007 conference of Society of Environmental Journalists) and Poynter's E-Media Tidbits)
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