They may be moving too ineptly and too slowly, but newspapers are confronting the reality that their longtime role as gatekeeper of information has reached an end. My former boss, McClatchy’s Howard Weaver, used to put it this way: Some newspapers are still standing guard at the gate; problem is, because of the Internet, the fences are all down.
One of the results is that the old days of one-way communication – the newspaper telling its readers what was important, take it or leave it – are fading away. Two-way communication is the order of the day. But only now are those of us who’ve spent our lives in the media coming to grips with what that means: It doesn’t just mean readers and listeners get to talk; it doesn’t just mean that the media listens; it also means that their feedback is acted upon.
Katharine Weymouth, the new publisher of the Washington Post, made this explicit in a remarkable memo she sent to Post staffers on Wednesday. “We must make fundamental changes to our business culture,” wrote Weymouth. “We must focus better on what the consumer indicates they want, and be less quick to emphasize only what we think is important.”
From a business standpoint, this seems so obvious that it requires no saying. But in the newsroom it’s been different. There the decades-long ethic has been that the newspaper is the best judge of community needs and information, and really shouldn’t be swayed by the special pleadings of customers. On occasion, there is still some truth to this. But as Weymouth suggests, it’s not a particularly effective business model — not anymore it isn’t.
Even so, this practice will die hard. To many newsrooms, acting on community druthers will smack of sellout, something to be resisted on principle. This view, of course, assumes that the old unilateralism was the right way of doing things. (It wasn’t.) But now, newspapers have no choice but to take many of their reporting assignments from expressed community desires.
Media consultant Elizabeth Osder made similar points at a conference last week at the University of Missouri. Journalism will arise from the individual needs of citizens, and away from something that rests with the press, she said. “That’s a very different idea of what journalism is,” she said. Not to mention better.
Weymouth’s memo also reminded me of something former Post columnist William Raspberry once observed about the Post‘s hometown coverage. It was clear from the newspaper’s stories, Raspberry said, that the Post was FOR the Washington Redskins. It wasn’t so clear that the Post was FOR Washington.
I suspect newspapers are going to make it clearer that they’re FOR their communities because they (the successful ones anyway) are going to be involved in a much richer dialogue that will illuminate their responsiveness to community wishes and needs. The best newspapers will do this and simultaneously do the hard-hitting investigation that makes some people in the community irate. But they’ll no longer stand as the omniscient arbiter of what the community needs. Not if they want to stay in business.