NewsBeat

8 NewsBeat December 2015 Reader engagement and relationships with communities are key T he Web disrupted print. Mobile disrupted the Web. Dominant social media and tech platforms are threatening the very idea of media brands as a consumer destination. Easy access to free content eroded subscription revenue. And now the last big source of money supporting journalism is threatened, as the concept of advertising itself is disrupted. There's a common thread through almost every major upheaval publishers have faced over the past 10 years. The digital transformation was not primarily a change from paper to screen, but a fundamental shift of power from brands to individuals. In 2008, Craigslist helped people find what they were looking for and sell stuff they didn't want, better and less expensively than newspaper classifieds. And so classifieds vanished. In 2015, the recommendation of a friend on social media, search engines and smart recommendation algorithms point them to the goods and services they need, so why wouldn't they install an ad blocker to avoid the barrage of publishers' increasingly desperate and intrusive display ads? By 2020, one thing is certain: technology will have exponentially advanced that empowerment of the individual. Media outlets who did not focus on user experience, engagement, customer service and relationships will be left behind. The audience is your lifeline Reader engagement has moved from buzzword to lasting focus in many newsrooms. But the publishers on the other side of the building are running circulation departments with outsourced customer service that can barely fulfill a simple subscription request or answer a question. They're presenting websites that are slow, laden with intrusive and deceptive advertising that don't work on mobile. And their strategy for reader revenue is a bundled-with-print paywall in which barely anyone pays for digital-only access. The traditional print readers who don't cancel get a big rate increase but never log in for access beyond the paywall, either. "They are taking their audience and their community for granted. They're not showing them the respect they deserve," said Robert Hernandez, a professor at the Annenberg School of Journalism at the University of Southern California. "…There's got to be a better way. There are other ways." The industry urgently needs innovation in advertising, Hernandez said, and that will require getting past "elitist church and state" dogma. Revenue and editorial staff (and developers, and designers) need to sit down and talk about how to serve the audience's needs through both advertising and journalism. When "advertising is done right, you're helping someone," he said, and tricking people through advertisements that look like articles but aren't labeled transparently isn't doing it right. He said the advertising side needs developers, "creative storytellers" and user experience experts. And similar to newsroom staff, ad sales reps need to develop relationships with the communities advertisers are trying to reach, not just the advertisers themselves.Are publishers really serving their community or an advertiser well when their answer is to make the ad bigger, take over the home page, move the ad around the page so it's hard to avoid, make the "close" button really hard to find? "Let's betray that relationship with the person who is coming to us for information," is the message, Hernandez said, and the rise of ad blocking technology is "a symptom of how bad we are with our design and our customer service." "I think we know what's coming: Readers shifting to mobile, growing expectation for video, outcomes- based selling, non-display revenue, deeper engagement with audiences on significantly improved multi-media display to produce increased loyalty," said Todd Benoit, publisher of the Bangor (Maine) Daily News. "I think the upcoming shift already can be seen in the growth of native content, which five years from now will look like a crude form of deeper audience engagement and will move the industry away from display and toward information services. Social platforms are already well down this road, and newspapers will follow. Membership is one way to express this, but the key will be using data to more accurately deliver useful information to readers and consumers at the right point of their journey through a topic, product or service." Damon Kiesow, head of mobile initiatives at McClatchy newspapers' interactive division, said, "It really comes down to focusing on the audience." "Their expectations are being set by a hundred or a thousand other media experiences they have on a daily basis," he continued, "and the non-news experiences they consume on the same devices." "Crappy user experiences cannot change fast enough," said Steve Buttry, former head of editorial innovation at Digital First Media who now oversees student media at Louisiana State University. "Print customer service departments can't start a subscription or deliver a paper for a customer who didn't get one. Websites load slowly or block the reader from the story she clicked on and intended to read." John Robinson, former editor of the News & Record in Greensboro, N.C., said he wishes he had learned more from "the Amazons and the Googles and the eBays" when he was leading a newsroom, "to understand that the real value to customers was being reliable, easy to use, quick and delivering relevant results." "Newspapers continue to have terrible customer service problems. They continue to cover things that readers really don't want or need," he said. "…(And) hearing a reader say, 'I don't go to your site because it's too much trouble,' should scare the bejeezus out of you." "If people have a stronger relationship with a news organization, they are more likely to pay for that relationship," said Buttry. "More important (because other sources of revenue are more important than subscriptions), if a news organization develops strong relations with the community through effective By MATT DERIENZO

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