I spend a fair amount of time in forums discussing news, both newspapers and digital news. I am struck by how often someone will chime in with “My grandmother won’t read news online” or “I don’t own a smartphone” or “I like paper coupons” as if those lone opinions somehow underscore a business case for favoring print. Now don’t get me wrong, it is true that there is a demographic associated with every one of those statements. But alone, one person’s opinion is not in itself proof of a trend, a market size, or even a powerful and resilient demographic. Too often an editor or publisher makes business decisions based on their own personal world view, or based on the views and experiences of the newspaper people with whom they associate. This is a mistake that can kill an industry. I came to the newspaper industry by way of the information design and user experience world, serving for over a decade as an information architect (or IA in Silicon Valley parlance). Information architecture is defined by Richard Saul Wurman as “the structure or map of information which allows others to find their personal paths to knowledge.” While a trained IA or user experience designer might develop solid user interfaces through natural instinct, we are trained early on not to design for what we would find intuitive ourselves, but for what the intended users (profiled into market segments or demographic archetypes), would find intuitive. This is one of the basic principles of user-centered design: you must think outside yourself and continually test your assumptions. I have worked for several years in marketing as well, and I know that marketing folks have similar tenets: don’t rely on positioning that would sway you, the writer, but instead think about what positioning would most influence your targeted demographic markets. And so I would strongly urge decision makers in the news industry (heck, everyone in the news industry!) to spend more time thinking not about what they would like, but where their advertisers and their readership are headed. Study the facts and figures. Looks at trends and analysis. You know how to find sources,...
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- Digital Marketing (8)
- eLearning (2)
- Future of eBooks (10)
- Future of News (11)
- More Visitors: SEO & SEM (8)
- Newspaper Revenue (3)
- Tablet and Mobile (9)
- Technology & Analytics (6)
Contents:
- Data Preparation for Analytics
- Community Engagement: Moving from Broadcast to Conversations
- Schema.org, Entity Search, and Semantic SEO Tagging
- Responsive Design: One Site for All Devices
- How Mobile Fits Into Your Overall Digital Strategy
- Designing Tablet Reader Apps: Information Architecture
- Designing Tablet Reader Apps: User Experience Design
- Designing Tablet Reader Apps: Content Analysis
- Designing Tablet Reader Apps: Audience and Purpose
- Designing Tablet Reader Apps: More Bells and Fewer Whistles?
- The Work Behind Social Marketing
- Search Engine Marketing (SEM) Tips: Analytics and Performance
- Search Engine Marketing (SEM) Tips: Keyword Management
- Search Engine Marketing (SEM) Tips: Competitive Analysis
- Kids, News, and Video
- Tablets, eBooks, and eLearning Make Middle School Less… Awkward
- Epilogue: The Miranda Proposal, Future and Facts
- The Long Tail of Publishing
- Who Will Develop the Next eBook Platform?
- What is the eBook Platform of Tomorrow?
- The Rise of eBook Applications
- Social Reading: Beyond Gutenberg? Beyond Zuckerberg!
- eBooks and the Triple Bottom Line
- The Future of Books
- Prologue: It’s Time for eBooks to Evolve
- Journatic, The Tribune, and Offshore Outsourced Journalism
- Warren Buffet is No Fool
- The Ultimate News Device: Tablets
- The Future of News: It’s Not About You, It’s About Them
- Newsroom Software: WordPress and Other Open Source Options
- Paywalls: The Wrong Solution for News
- How to Drive Online News Revenue
- Don’t Build Your Own Newsroom
- Digital Editions and Portable News
- Why Photos are Critical to Online News
- Site Analytics: Intelligence Gathering for News Sites
- How To Do SEO Right
- From Newspapers to Digital Media: Follow John Paton
- What is SEO?
- SEO and SEM for News
- Trusted Advertising: The Value of Newspaper Web Sites
- Capitalizing on News Assets
- Where Did Newspapers Go Wrong?
- The Fall of the Newspaper
- Why Blogging Writes?