Adapting to the Audience

How would your life be impacted if the tools of your trade where changing almost overnight? What if with each passing year a new technology emerged that you had to master in order to stay current? This is the current struggle that faces those in the media world today.

Online news reporting is the only medium that is currently growing in its audience size (State of the Media 2011). In fact the same report states that 2010 was the first year that the percentage of audiences receiving their news online surpassed those gathering the information by traditional newspapers. This is creating a major paradigm shift for media outlets. Social networks, forums, comment windows, and RSS feeds are not just neat features of a company anymore; they are a necessity.

The effect of these changes on a journalist is probably more profound. While most of the world is easily adapting to the way they receive their news, the journalist has to change the way they collect, document, report, and disseminate their stories. The timeless image of a scraggly reporter standing on the steps of a courthouse scribbling down quotes from the latest big case in his personalized shorthand is fading quickly. These days it’s an immaculately groomed anchor jostling for microphone positioning to stream the situation live, while responding to Twitter comments on her mobile phone.

What was formally a one way flow of information has now become a conversation. Michael R. Fancher (former Executive Editor of the Seattle Times) believes this change requires “that journalists let go of the sense that we have control and recognize how much better public service journalism can be when we accept the public as true partners” (read the rest of his article in the Nieman Reports here). With the advances in technology everyone can be a reporter. Partnering with the public to raise awareness, broaden perspectives, and share otherwise untapped information can only make professionals better journalists.  

Another thing to remember is that as technology changes, so do the perspectives of our audiences. What we remember as the tools of the trade are quickly becoming non-existent. A photographer friend of mine recently had a chat with his three-year old nephew. They were walking around taking pictures; the photographer with a film camera he was experimenting with, the nephew with his new digital camera. When the time came to change his film, the three year old commented, “I have a real camera. It doesn’t need film.” What a perfect example of how the world we grow up in and the technologies we know form our ideas of the standard.

As journalists, if we want to continue to call others to action we need to adapt to their tastes. In Bill Mitchell’s report Clues in the Rubble, he believes the “news is being produced by users themselves as they enhance the work of journalists with their own reporting, recommendations and distribution.” There is a place for professional journalists in this ever-shrinking world, but we cannot ignore the wants of the consumer. To be successful interactivity and multi-media reports are the key to accessing readers’ laptops and iPads. We must venture where they venture. After all, what’s the point of telling a story if no one is there to read it?