When I was at Northwestern’s Medill School, 45 years ago, I was pursued by a singular idea. That was, all the media we studied would eventually become one.
At the time there were three majors at Medill (four if you count advertising). You could major in newspapers, in magazines, or in TV. It was easy to tell us apart. The TV majors dressed well while the print majors looked like the students we were.
While I haven’t made a fortune since, my idea has been fulfilled, even if the media industry still doesn’t know it.
There is only one medium now. This medium, the Internet.
There is no newspaper business, no magazine business. There is no TV business, no newsletter business. These are all just means to the same end, which is communication. The problem is we don’t know what the new industry is about.
Here’s a surprising answer that shouldn’t be a surprise. It’s about segmentation. It’s about serving a specific audience in every way you can. It shouldn’t be a surprise because the answer was the same 45 years ago.
The problem is most media companies still don’t understand that. MSNBC doesn’t yet understand it’s competing directly with the New York Times and Time Magazine for the attention of their demographic. The Times still thinks it’s a local newspaper when it’s a global one. Local stations still think they must deliver national stories.
Publishers, and that’s what site managers are, still don’t know their business. That is, to identify with your target reader, then to deliver what’s important to them, based on location, industry, or lifestyle. You can do it through newsletters, through web-based stories, through live or canned video, through live or canned podcasts, or in apps. What matters is the connection. What matters is that you’re serving your target market, interacting with it. That’s another important change. You have to feed interaction, both with your audience and within it.
That means ignoring the rest of the market. It means identifying your competition accurately, based not on where you came from but who you’re serving. Fox isn’t competing with MSNBC. It has a different target market. These two media aren’t TV stations. They must offer the whole panoply of media in any way their targets wish to consume it.
This was easier to understand back when media was defined by how it came to people. The Houston Business Journal was a once-weekly paper. The Houston Chronicle was a daily paper with business news. Houston City was a monthly magazine that focused on entertainment but also covered news stories. KHOU was a TV station. They all covered Houston, but two covered it narrowly, and two broadly.
Today what’s left of the newspaper must compete with the TV station. Both should also be narrowing their focus, ignoring national or international news, looking solely after the specific audience they want to reach. The business pages also must narrow their geographic focus but broaden how they serve it. A local business paper should have a daily newsletter, a weekly podcast, and stories that break whenever they break. So should everyone.
News happens when it happens. Analysis can be scheduled, and it doesn’t have to happen all the time. The same with in-depth pieces. Podcasts and newsletters must go on, on a regular schedule.
News should have a camera on it. I know that a local school board meeting sounds boring. It’s not if you’re in that district. A local publisher can make bank if they focus on what’s happening in their territory exclusively, and deeply. This is what lets you expand permission, from a hit to a transaction, from a transaction to a list, from a list to a paid subscription. It’s what brings in advertisers, service to the target, trust you can sell.
These rules apply to all journalism. No matter what you think you’re doing, the audience sees it all as the same thing. Define that audience, define your competition, focus narrowly, go deep with everything this medium can provide, then climb the permission ladder to success.
