We Need to Think Differently About How People Get “News”

On changing ideas about competitive sets, and a case for much greater customization

Welcome to Second Rough Draft, a newsletter about journalism in our time, how it (often its business) is evolving, and the challenges it faces.

An 1897 newspaper editorial observed that "Everybody talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it.” These days, everyone in the news business knows that news consumption habits are changing radically, especially for younger people, but our thinking about how news is offered isn’t changing nearly as much. This week, I want to touch on one aspect of this, something pretty basic and in a sense well known, but insufficiently considered I think.

In simplest terms, the point is this: a lot of ways people are getting information about public events and ideas—what we in the business consider “news”—aren’t thought of as consuming “news” by the people on the receiving end. The result is that we are producing news reports without proper regard for what audiences want to know or may already know—nor what their alternative sources are to our offerings.

Beyond social media and creators

It makes no sense, for instance, to believe that social media is an alternative source of news (as everyone now does), or that news creators are emerging as one (nearly ditto), but that late night comedy shows or entertainment or sports podcasts or weather apps or screens in passenger elevators or government or corporate websites are not. Trump’s Mafia-style campaign to suppress hostile comedians (“we can do this the easy way or the hard way”) makes clear that he understands this very well.

Even more prosaically, we have always known that a lot of news is passed along by “word of mouth,” but in an age of ubiquitous electronic messaging, this is almost certainly a much greater factor than it was previously. It’s just a lot easier to do, more quickly and with less of a toll in effort, time or cost. And when news is thus shared, it is transformed in various important ways, from often being shorn of its source (i.e., with no attribution to your or any other news organization) to being distilled, sometimes accurately, sometimes less so.

Forget Waldo. Spot all the news sources.

Okay, you may say, that’s all true, now what to do about it? Candidly, I have less of a definitive answer than I usually try to provide in these columns. But I do have some thoughts.

First, we simply need to get more accurate pictures in the heads of editors and publishers about how those they seek to reach come to know what they know. Some of this will involve better data about information flows, which a number of scholars, including some at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Shorenstein Center (where I am on the advisory board) are seeking to collect.

Competing with non-competitors

But even before that, or absent it, we need to think much more broadly about what we used to call the “competitive set.” The key difference today is that many of the sources we need to take into account are not “competitors” at all, both in the sense that their objectives bear no relation to our own, and in the further sense that while we may need to adapt to their presence, the reverse may not be true. There can be critical asymmetries at play.

Beyond this, the incredible differentiation in how readers even of a single, well-defined publication come across what they consider “news,” means that we need increasingly to accept, at least in my view, that we are publishing for different audiences even in the same time and place. The form and format of our offerings almost certainly need to better reflect this, and to be far more customizable than they currently are. AI should already facilitate this in ways not yet being employed. More will very likely soon be feasible.

Rethinking live blogs

One good example of an arena in need of help may be “live blogs” of breaking news, which I (and others with whom I have talked) frequently find very frustrating. Most seem premised on the notion that readers are getting all of their news about the event in question from the blog’s publisher, and that they are hanging around waiting for more as the event evolves.

In real life (unless you are, say, trapped on an overnight flight), people who work in the newsroom of the publisher may be virtually the only ones behaving this way. Actual consumers are, almost undoubtedly, dipping in and out, maybe consulting other possible sources, and even being bombarded by messages pushed their way. Mostly, of course, they are going about their lives, bumping into the blog when they otherwise seek out news as such. These news products badly need to be reconfigured in a manner that takes account of all this.

More broadly, we need to break psychologically with the notion that “news” is a binary, that there is “news” and “non-news.” When you put it that way, I hope, many of us already understand that rather than a binary, we face a continuum—and not just one such spectrum, but a slightly different one for each of our consumers. A critical part of the next stage in the creation of news offerings for our time will be not only to recognize this reality, but to better reflect it in the products we offer and how they are distributed. This is a big challenge, but one with which we need to start grappling.

Second Rough Draft will likely be off next week. See you soon.