What Customers Really Want from the New News

Consistently providing the highest quality news is the best policy for news organizations trying to survive in the niched media environment. However, they may have to change the way they cover issues--starting more often from the ground up rather than the top down.

Every journalist has had the discouraging experience of producing a "serious" issue story, only to find that some entertainment piece captured the audience that day. A much-vaunted NBC health care special flopped when viewers fled to tabloid entertainment on other channels. Many journalists say that if the public wanted "serious" journalism they would provide a stronger market for it. Substance doesn't sell, they say.

There are three things wrong with this argument. First, even our "best" journalism consistently misses the mark because it is hobbled by strategy and score-keeping formulas that shut out the audience. Second, the tabloid approach cannot ensure a solid, long-term audience--particularly in the niched media landscape. Third, the issues piece is usually an isolated phenomenon. It often comes at the wrong time, in the wrong place, for consumers to respond. Now that consumers can access the news when they want, they are more likely to seek news they can trust.

Good Journalism Does Sell

Even though our best journalism often is flawed by strategy frames, cynicism, and other bad habits, the audience for serious public issues is impressive. Consider the following evidence:

• In October 1991, the Philadelphia Inquirer ran a nine-part series by Donald L. Barlett and James B. Steele about the global economy, leveraged buy-outs, deregulation, and related subjects. The Inquirer reprinted 18,000 copies of the series and made them available the day the last story ran; the copies were gone in 48 hours. In all, the paper ended up printing 400,000 copies of the series. When it was published later as a book, it sold more than 500,000 more copies.⁸⁵ Televised local town hall meetings in Wichita and other communities also have led their markets, even when scheduled against major sporting events.

• The marketplace strength of the respected New York Times continues, while tabloids like the New York Post struggle to survive. Good newspapers have a halo effect for advertisers. Most would rather be associated with a credible news product than a tabloid or a circular.

• Although fewer people watch the evening news programs now than in the 1960s, about 31 million (a significant number) still tune in every night to ABC, NBC, and CBS. Ratings of the "MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour" indicate an audience of 5 million viewers each day. CNN and C-SPAN have small hourly audiences but significant cumulative daily and weekly audiences.Common Knowledge. "Our subjects reacted with special enthusiasm to information about how to take control of public issues. We found, for example, that a fairly technical magazine story about the stock market was given high marks for interest by our audience judges because it emphasized what you can do about the problem." They advise journalists to "incorporate the dimension of civic action into the substance of the news story." Market surveys indicate that the people most likely to approve of press performance today are poorly informed about public affairs. "They see the news as essentially part of the entertainment package that eases their passage through their own real-world lives," says Donald Kellerman of the Times Mirror Center.

  Times Mirror polls have found that those readers and viewers who watch the news most closely are most critical of its quality. According to Kellerman, however, if the news is presented from a different point of view, treating readers and viewers as citizens, it acquires a different value. "When the news relates to their everyday lives, when it's presented that way, people are interested." Then Brown reviewed the federal budget and calculated both how much Knox County provided in taxes and how much it received in the form of welfare, food stamps, medicare, social security, roads, tunnels, buildings, national parks, federal prisons, university research, and military facilities. Citizens realized, at the end of Brown's report, that they had to choose which programs should be cut in order to reduce their income taxes.

  The idea that people are less interested in current news fare because they simply aren't reading or aren't interested in events isn't true, surveys indicate. Young people are reading more books and magazines than ever and checking out more books from libraries. Local and national television news programs holding consistent first-place positions in their markets are most often those offering the highest quality news, rather than the tabloid approach. While this is especially true in Boston, Minneapolis, and Dallas, it is a good rule of thumb for most communities, according to telecommunications consultant John Ellis. As long as the more serious, high-quality newscast avoids becoming "stuck up," Ellis and Altman believe it can beat the tabloids. If it is connected to citizens' concerns, not just to official events, it has even stronger audience appeal over time.

  Tabloid-style news isn't a good long-term strategy mainly because entertainment niches already are too crowded with similar programs. Ellis notes, "There will always be somebody who can outsleaze you. That's your downfall." In addition, tabloid formulas distance people from the news, just when making connections is what counts. In spite of temporary ratings boosts, tabloid-style newscasts usually don't generate the kind of customer loyalty that matters in the niched media marketplace.

  At WCCO in Minneapolis, for example, management found that tabloid coverage backfired because it weakened the station's link with its audience. John Lansing, who was TV News Director at the time, recalls that WCCO's tabloid news experimentation in May 1992 temporarily put it on top in its market, but it couldn't keep meeting the expectations they had set. "Ratings actually dropped for newscasts that were missing a heavily advertised, sexy topic," he says. WCCO had to be "even more outrageous the next time in order to preserve our numbers." According to Lansing, this formula also made the station uncomfortable. They knew they were distracting their viewers with entertainment instead of connecting to them with real news. "While they were watching tabloid-style news, viewers actually distanced themselves from the `real' community, the one in which they work and live and play every day. We realized we didn't know our community's needs, and, worse, we were contributing to the community's disengagement from itself."