Tough times for newspapers
“The community formerly known as the audience”
warned Joanna Geary, Communities Editor for The Times, last week.
Her lecture covered the importance for newspapers to understand their audience. Readers are key, and building a community is essential.
She pointed out that many papers are out of touch with readers, concentrating on what Editors think is a good story, not what their readers want to see.
Newspapers like The Times which are succeeding as a business now have to analyse their readers carefully. The Guardian are even considering an algorithm to define their audience!
Moving online has been a revolutionary way of communicating and forming a community – but it is not always well executed.
Joanna admitted that the newspaper’s best online commentators were not enthusiastic when contacted by email to take part in online debates. Yet she was the first journalist in Birmingham to engage with the audience properly and realised that papers should be actively concerned with their niches.
People want to engage in their own time, and will feel the need to comment when they feel passionately about something. They need to be enticed with the right kind of content.
Understanding your target audience is crucial. Here’s a magazine example: Sugar.
The teen mag’s website Sugarscape is one of the best around. It perfectly captures the teenage mindset with its great use of polls, interactive and user generated content.
Many favourites like Cosmogirl and Ellegirl have closed down after failing to reach the right target audience. Ellegirl was criticised for not appealing to the average U.K. girl; it spoke mainly to a richer and slightly pretentious fashionista.
Sugar, however, is still going strong and is now the most popular teen magazine. It has realised that it has to listen to its readers and give them what they want.
You’re not writing for yourself, you’re writing with a specific reader in mind – or so we’re constantly being told. Perhaps newspapers ought to take a leaf out of magazines’ books in this respect.
KT's journalistic musings 