Gosh there is just so much to say about Michael Lavers’ piece in the Village Voice about the decline facing the gay press. There’s been an immediate response — and I think Matt Comers’ reaction might actually be even better than Lavers’ original piece — so I just want to boil everything down as simply as possible.
The Problem
Readers are leaving newspapers all over the place; but it’s a particular problem in niche markets since they’re so sensitive to fluctuation — the canaries of the news industry.
Where are readers going? The Internet, obviously.
Why are they going there? Because they like it better (obviously).
What’s the solution? Ah, that’s not so obvious. But I have a good guess.
The Solution
The Internet does some things really well. (Breaking news, community, multimedia.) Print does some things really well, too. (Selling ads.) This is why I have a whole presentation on what old-timey and new-timey writers can learn from each other.
I love what Matt Comers says about not thinking of yourself as a newspaper with a website, but a multimedia company with two properties. Yup: from where I’m standing, with one leg in blogs and one leg in newspapers, success will lie in having content for diverse platforms, and playing to those platforms’ strengths.
Got a video clip? Put it online. Got a story about new tire technology? Put it in the newspaper, and then have the advertising department call Big O Tires.
Smart entertainment companies are already diversifying content according to the strengths of different platforms. NBC puts the sitcoms in primetime, webisodes on Hulu, and local NYC programming on videoscreen in taxi cabs. (I just got back from a fabulous trip to Brooklyn, BTW.)
In a few months, I’m going to be speaking on a panel at the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists’ Association’s LGBT Media Summit. Specifically, I’ll be talking about the new ways that people consume news today. I can’t wait.
The Innovations
Everyone agrees that news has to change somehow in order to survive, and I think it’s really weird that very few people are talking about the role of nerds in all this.
Or more specifically, engineers, designers, coders … you know, the people who made the Internet for which everyone’s deserting newspapers.
I think that when we see really successful news organizations, a major component of their success will be technical investment. These organizations will need to have as much emphasis on having an A+ platform as on having A+ content.
For example, an old-media organization like Village Voice Media has a slew of problems on their site that act as pageview-repellent. It’s cluttered and “un-Internetish,” for one thing. There’s a special widget for changing the font size at the top of the article — WTF? Does that really get enough use to justify making it as tall as the headline? The site’s showing me ads for places in New York, which would be fine if I wasn’t in San Francisco. The article is paginated, which is simply rude. The comments are hidden by default! And they don’t support HTML! And the CAPTCHA breaks! You can’t subscribe to comments! The RSS is truncated! The social media badges are at the end of the article (rather than up top, with that font-size doohickey). Disastrously, all of the links in the article are simply to search results for keywords on VVM’s own site. And frustratingly, even though the illustrations on the site can be quite nice, there doesn’t seem to be a way to purchase a physical print.
Worst of all: the site looks the same to everyone who visits. I see the same Village Voice as everyone else, no matter what articles I’ve read in the past, what I’ve commented on, and what Facebook says my interests are. IT IS CRAZY. So, I don’t understand why everyone is so baffled by newspapers’ shrinking numbers.
I know The Village Voice isn’t a gay paper, necessarily, but it’s easy to pick on and I see these mistakes repeated throughout the gay press. And, for that matter, every other press.
So anyway, publishers: with all that money you’re saving by firing reporters, maybe you could give some thought to hiring a few techies. It’ll be just like the old days, when you had to hire someone to run your printing press. Remember?
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I'm a writer and photographer in San Francisco, curious about how people can get away with writing all day while also being able to afford to buy groceries. 