Threat response

How are newspapers (in particular) responding to the threat of losing revenue and market share to online? There are constant opinion pieces about the subject in print and online the world over, and I link you here to yet another.

Very rarely are you watching online video from a news site that’s bigger than about 600 pixels wide. Not only has the vision been compressed, so has the sound. Online viewers live with less-than-perfect vision and sound quality, and why? Because it’s not what is of utmost importance to them. Content, content, content.

Basically the argument in the article is that a “good enough” attitude towards online video (in this example) is often interpreted as degrading the mission, whatever that might be.

I would argue that it is in fact perfectionism that could be degrading the mission. The article tells one story of a paper that purchased expensive cameras and expensive editing software to respond to the call for online video, and so could only afford that small amount of equipment. But it meant only two people could work at a time, either shooting or editing, and the length of their production process meant they were scooped online by other outlets.

So what did the editor do? Better-invested his resources in six cameras that were 90% cheaper than the others, and allowed staff to use iMovie, the free video editing software that came on the Apple Macs most of them already used. Instead of two people, now 17 were working on video, and instead of only managing 50 local videos a month with the more expensive gear, they were now churning out 195 per month.

And the result? Readers responded and the traffic came, nearly doubling in 10 months.

There are some good quotes in the article, and you can either read the whole thing there, or some of them that I’ve reproduced here.

“Defining different roles for the online and print products has given many newspapers a new sense of purpose and more optimism about their future.

Lately, however, newspapers have quit whining. They don’t have time for it.
…Rather than lament past missteps, many papers have begun leveraging the Internet to reach customers in ways once never thought possible.
…At the small- and mid-market papers … there’s no time for perfectionism … the mantra should be “good enough,”

When the good enough theory is applied to an industry steeped in idealism, it’s sometimes interpreted as degrading the mission.