June 24, 2010
Research compiled by Clyde Bentley
We've all been cornered by someone who demands to know why journalists do what we do. We know why, but sometimes you get rid of a critic with a simple "it's our job." This month, lets see if the researchers can provide better answers than that.
Making us tick: A 17-member team of researchers from around the world recently boiled down the influences on journalists to just six general topic areas. Led by Thomas Hanitzch of the University of Munich, the academics each interviewed 100 journalists from their 17 countries, using a standardized questionnaire to probe for what the news people said drove their work.
As you might expect, the myriad answers ranged from deadlines to government officials to editors and advertisers. Hanitzch's team then fed that long list into a computer program that looked for similarities in the answers and clustered them into "principal components." The result after several more statistical checks was a list of six influences in this order:
- Professional influences
- Procedural Influences
- Organizational Influences
- Reference Groups
- Economic Influences
- Political Influences
The fact that economics and politics were at the bottom of the pile was somewhat surprising. Both, the researchers said, were powerful factors but were trumped by traditions, policies, the relentless news cycle and similar factors. A large part of "Reference Groups" is the audience, which is also lower than I expected.
The study was reported in the Spring edition of Journalism and Mass Communications Quarterly, which is not easy to find online (but you can can contact Hanitzch or co-author Patrick Lee Plaisance at Colorado State.)
While the study is interesting in itself, I think that list could be an incredible subject for a newsroom retreat. The best way to minimize undue pressures is to identify them. Recognizing that all journalists feel similar pressures and then trying to name examples in each of the six categories could be a major eye-opener to both line journalists and management. If you give it a try, let me know how it works.
Audience or market: A related study published in the same edition of JQ tries to determine if news organizations act more like institutions or businesses. Wilson Lowrey of Alabama and Chang Wan Woo at Wisconsin conducted a national survey of editors that measured how they respond to uncertainty and then performed a content analysis on the newspapers of those editors.
One way theorists distinguish between "institutional organizations" and "business (aka rational-choice) organizations" is how they handle uncertainty. The former has a rather ceremonial approach to challenges, meeting them with procedures and traditions. Business organizations respond to uncertainty by monitoring their markets by and acting on their needs. Lowrey and Woo said institution-type newspapers are "loosely coupled" with audiences and business trends so they do not need to respond "to every ill wind that blows." Think of the wall between advertising and editorial.
Business-type organizations are tightly coupled to customers and constantly monitor market changes. For newspapers, that means intensely monitoring the audience and the business environment, then responding by tweaking operations.
The editors and their papers, of course, were both institutional and businesslike. The surveyed editors do indeed monitor their audiences -- at least their online metrics -- but that doesn't always lead to changes in their practice. Increased competition, in fact, leads to more mimicry in newspaper Websites. Also, increased monitoring of audience metrics doesn't always lead to stronger coupling with the marketing functions of the organization.
The lesson from Lowrey and Woo is that newspaper editors are on the right track by watching the online responses of their audiences. But if they look at the reader stats and then go looking for a ready-made solution developed by another paper, they are just falling back into an institutional mode. Balancing "let's give them what has always been our job to provide" with "let's give them what they want" has become a major pressure in newsrooms.
The Gender Switch: Newspapers efforts to equalize the opportunities for women in the newsrooms and front offices are old hat. But now the emergence of women as the dominant market force in the United States will likely change the products we produce.
Newsweek's Rana Foroohar provided a wake-up call this month with "The Richer Sex: Companies had better cater to women." The article told how 35% of wives in dual-income families make more than their husbands and that the average woman will make more than the average man by 2024.
The peg for Foroohar's story was Hewlett-Packard's new netbook -- an elegant "digital clutch" styled like a makeup case. Even at $599 -- double other netbooks -- it is flying off the shelves.
A grizzled old editor once told me the reason we had a whole department devoted to sports was that the editors were all guys and liked to go to ball games. That won't fly with H-P's customers nor the new online media audience. Check Unicast's "What Women Want for the Web Report 2010 (pdf)." The report not only noted that women make 85% of all brand purchases and control $7 billion in annual spending, but that "keeping up with the news" was second (67%) only to "connect with family and friends" (76%) when asked what they plan to do online this summer.
Most of the spate of articles on women in the marketplace has focused on advertising. But a good piece in Toronto'sGlobe and Mail gives a more universal list of tips. Like marketers of retail goods, publishers can only reach women by paying attention to the details they want. Take a hard look at your news operation and ask:
- What am I offering her as a product?
- How is it packaged?
- Am I giving her the gift of time?
- Am I giving her an experience?
- What does she need to get out of it?
- What would she be delighted to get out of it?
- What little tweaks can I make along the way?
“Then make sure it does the job,” she said Jill Nykoliation, strategist for the Juniper Park ad agency. “Women don’t tolerate things that don’t do the job. Get that
right and wrap it in an experience.”
Do what I do: Of course, one of the most understandable explanations for one's actions is "because that's what everyone does." But the question for newsroom managers is whether their journalists actually do behave like their readers.
Some of the best practical research for that is to simply to compare yourself to your neighbors. However, you can also keep your eye on the audience data rolling out of research centers. A report by ExactTarget really hit home with me this month. The study showed that 58% of American online users start their day by looking at their e-mail.
Years ago I did a large study on newspaper reading habit (pdf). I found that one of the best predictors of regular newspaper readership was food -- coffee in particular. Sitting down with the morning paper and a cup of Joe was such a cherished tradition that the content was less important to many people than was the comforting activity of reading.
But e-mail? Most of my colleagues have assumed that coffee, a bagel and a Web page was the new American morning routine. The ExactTarget report doesn't describe the methodology, so I can't tell if the survey simply left out Web sites (along with print products). But it's worth asking your staff about. I realized that clicking the "mail" button on my mobile phone while I'm heading downstairs to breakfast has become routine. So would I respond to the news better if it was packaged in a cheery morning message? I'm not sure.
Yet.
Contact Me:
E-mail - bentleycl@missouri.edu Twitter: http://twitter.com/MizzouBentley
