Newspaper is something you read, the web is something you do
October 17, 2008 by marek.miller
During the fourth session of WAN’s Readership Conference in Amsterdam in October 16-17, 2008, Mario Garcia, President, Garcia Media, USA spoke about how we can attract and retain the attention of people who think fast, absorb fast and demand new information faster than any generation that preceded it.
Mario Garcia
Reading a newspaper is more like a leisure activity. Reading on computer associates you with your work. This is one of the reasons the paper will survive, if not stay eternal. But one cannot ignore online. Most of the projects newspaper start, are dated long in the future, some yet are called “project 2012″, “project 2013″, and this is all because the publishers have to think much in advance.
In opposition to newspaper being something to read, the web is something you do. Everybody can become a journalist nowadays – newspaper companies receive texts, photos and voice information from readers. It is online that allows users to participate in the editorial process, and interactivity is the key here.
The newspapers must learn how to get the reader involved. “The New York Times” for example, publishes on its webpage interactive graphics, that can be adjusted to the reader’s needs. Again, web (like advertising) is something that people do.
It is important for newsmedia companies to implement the right path for the news. And to create an environment that will understand what is this right path of the story. Everything should start as an alert, most likely from the mobile platform, answering the for core journalism 5W’s questions: who, what, when, where, why. Next stage is the report, not the full story but something more than the alert, with some extra information in hte text. The third step is the story, possibly printed in tomorrow’s newspaper as a second day update. Then the fourth and additional steps are stories again, most likely online as following updates, until the story eventually dies online.
Keeping this in mind, publishers should realize, the newspapers become sort of accessory, somewhere in the middle of the entire process. To prove his point, Mario Garcia showed a headline of the newspaper, which covered the fire incident. The headline said “Behind the fire incident”. The newspaper informed about the incident for the first time, but since it had happened the day before, the editors assumed that the readers knew this already (whether from TV or the Internet). So they decided to attract the readers with the story from behind the incident. The speaker suggested this was the direction all publishers should take.
Mario Garcia told the listeners, what the publishers should already know about the readers:
- they do read in-depth online
- the navigational intuition is brought from online to print
- all readers are scanners, and do enjoy secondary readings, fact boxes and elements beyond the text
- they like their print and online editions to share a certain look and feel
According to Mr. Garcia, the print will not die. What will happen is the adaptation of the newspapers to the new role.
Tagged: conference, newspapers, online, strategy, WAN
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