An interview with Joy Mayer as she begins her Fellowship year.
By Alecia Swasy
The fear is "if you give them what they want, it will be all Britney Spears…"
Readers and advertisers have found new sources for information, such as social media, start-up independent news sites and blogs, leaving the legacy media scrambling to stay alive. Mayer believes one solution is to forget the elitist, we-know-it-all model and instead have a real conversation with the audience. "Ditch the lecture. Join the conversation" is the focus of her 2010-11 Donald W. Reynolds Fellowship at the Reynolds Journalism Institute.
As design editor at the Columbia Missourian, Mayer sees the need for news leaders to be more deeply engaged with the newspaper’s readers. Finding the time to do that can be especially challenging while producing a newspaper with a staff that changes every 16 weeks. Now she has the chance to step back and "take the dreams outside the newsroom" during her fellowship.
One key issue is how to translate data already available into real changes that will reflect what readers want. For instance, in the past, editors generally feared pandering to the readers who don't want coverage of serious issues, such as the economy or war. The fear is "if you give them what they want, it will be all Britney Spears," Mayer says.
"We have all these analytics on what they're reading, how much time they spend on the site," says Mayer, who worked previously in design and editing at the Sarasota Herald Tribune. "But how many decisions are made based on that? How many newsrooms are planning coverage based on it?"
The "do it better" attitude seems to be ingrained in Mayer. As a college student at the University of Oklahoma, Mayer heard there was money to be made if you could spot errors in the student newspaper. "I got a red pen and started circling all the mistakes," Mayer says, "and I got hired as a copy editor."
During her fellowship year, Mayer wants to build a database of "engagement case studies," a log of those news organizations, big or small, that are really engaged with readers.
This isn't a new conversation — many news leaders have been lamenting this at convention panels and web posts. Trouble is, "we've done a terrible job of communicating with each other.” Just like in the competition over who’s first with the breaking news, in the realm of ideas "we're afraid of being scooped," Mayer says.
She expects to visit news organizations, especially start ups trying new approaches to listening to readers, and blog about her results. She also wants to study what other industries, such as public health, sociology and politics, have done to listen, engage and measure what really works.
"I want to find examples of real engagement with the audience, define it and measure it," she says. "If we say engaging with readers is our goal, there's got to be a way to do that."
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