The Issue of Relevance

If you need a pseudo-focus group to tap into, here’s one:
Journalism in Pain

(Courtesy of Doug Fisher’s Common Sense Journalism)

Read the comments and you can find a lot of reasons why people don’t read the newspaper. Excerpts:

Newspapers are, frankly, a hassle. Why people still read them, I don't know.

I get nearly all of my news - "serious" coverage and celebrity junk - from other sources: online, talk radio, and cable news, and I stay better informed from a wider variety of sources.

Doesn't ad revenue really pay for a paper? I always understood that the subsciption price just basically paid for delivery. Well, my subscription price is too high. So they lose readers, and ad revenues fall. What a dirty, viscious [sic] circle.

Obviously, you need to understand your local market and what drives desires to read (or, more importantly, not read) your newspaper. However, some of these attitudes are fairly universal. Yes, there will be some local differences in what is and is not relevant. The battle is one of generations, not geography. It’s also one of marketing—selling to readers what is important.

Still, you need to find out what readers find relevant. Here are some tips from my forthcoming book:

• Assess just how far off base you are with readers. Ask your staff for their input. Ask friends or family members for honest assessments of how useful the newspaper is to them. Ask a non-competing newspaper to offer an assessment.
  
• Quantify how many stories, features of services fulfill important needs for readers. Take a look at your newspaper’s content and determine how many stories are written for readers and how many are written because they are routine beat coverage. Are features truly lively and enlightening pieces or do they simply fit a preconceived notion of what a newspaper feature is? Establish a benchmark so you can note improvements.
  
• Brainstorm ways to connect with readers. Involve as many staffers as possible. Don’t edit ideas. Promote free and open discussion. Don’t dismiss ideas as illogical or expensive.
  
• Get out of the office. Get everybody out of the office. Interact with readers on a non-business level. Learn about them as people, not customers. Don’t even bring up the paper in discussion. Ask about their lives.