Want to know what works in news?
- Instantaneous (Al Jazeera’s liveblogs) or old news (any newspaper) or even older news (The Economist)
- Print-first (most student newspapers) or digital-first (it has saved the Journal Register papers) or even newsletter-first (DailyCandy and tons of B2B)
- Quality (The New York Times) or good-enough (Gawker, free Metro papers around the world)
- News from all over the place (HuffPo) or unique coverage (McSweeneys, The New Republic)
- Social (Hacker News, reddit) or algorithmic (Google News) or editorial (Andrew Sullivan’s The Dish)
- Professional (every newspaper) or amateur (Evanston Now, Berkeleyside) or by students (The Local East Village)
- Mobile-first (arguably The Wall Street Journal) or no mobile at all (most local and rural papers)
- Niche (TechCrunch) or subculture-based (Monocle) or something for everyone (Sunday papers)
- Paywall (The Financial Times, Mediapart) or porous and metered (Morris among others), contributor memberships (MetaFilter) or free (many, many others)
- Service-driven (Curbed) or community-driven (Davis Wiki) or format-driven (Politifact) or story-driven (Harper’s)
- Collaboration (California Watch plus its many partners) and competition (any country with more than one national broadsheet)
- Non-profit (MinnPost) or for-profit (The Batavian)
- Short (Newser) or long (Slate) or longer (ProPublica’s Kindle Singles)
- Being a technology company (The Texas Tribune), meticulous about metadata (The Guardian) or neither (any and all bloggers)
- Opinionated (Techdirt) or even biased (FoxNews or IndyMedia) or dryly factual (BBC News)
Give me a facet and I’ll give you success stories from all over the spectrum. Business successes and editorial ones.
People always look for the one best solution. Fact is, you can make just about anything work if you’re smart about it.
5 comments
Nice overview. I can easily see these being documented as design patterns.
Thing is, design patterns presumably solve problems whereas I think that the facets I outlined above don't solve anything at all, they're just possibilities that can be molded into successful businesses with the right marketing, editorial plan, workforce, pricing, environment and so on.
In a sense, it's the news industry's exemplification of the "ideas don't matter, execution does" mantra.
That being said, the strategy STILL matters.
While there's not one killer strategy for all news (which I think is your point), there are still strategies that are going to be optimal for any organization given the situation they are in.
You still have to make strategic choices. And that may take some searching.
And yes, after that -- tactics and execution kill.
No disagreement there: print-first works for college newspapers because of the specific usage patterns of campus dwellers, the BBC is stuck with strict impartiality because all their brand equity revolves around it and Davis Wiki only works because that city had a close-knit community already even before they came on the scene.
Everything can work, but not for everyone all the time.
Even so, I want to argue that most organizations, not just news organizations, are a bit too worried about picking the one valid strategy, while there's usually at least a couple of really good ones.
For example, I have a gut feeling that the majority of newspapers could thrive without even as much as a mobile website, while at the same time I feel that mobile is full of great opportunities. I'm equally excited about social tv, but I don't believe broadcasters that don't care about the web will always lose out. And there's no paradox in those statements.
Actually, those examples are not the best ones because they're about doing something vs. doing nothing... but you catch my drift.