Some possibilities for using the Internet to redefine news agendas

One of the most novel things about the Internet is that it is the only medium that works just as well one-to-one as it does broadcasting to the masses.

It also works almost as well many-to-one as it does one-to-many. However, since most media organisations are in the business of publishing, as opposed to listening, this feature has gone largely unused. Apart from the possibilities for on-line voting, little effort has been put into developing technologies to harness it.

The reason media organisations haven’t harnessed this feature yet is that they think of themselves as the source of news and their customers as consumers. Yet it is a revolutionary possibility and one which presents a serious challenge to the traditional news agenda.

News agendas are the second thing journalism students learn about after news values. Once you’ve learnt to ask "what is important?" it is natural to ask "how do we know what is important?"

The only answers to this question come as an unconvincing: "Well ... we just know because people buy the news services that contain what we put there". This leads to a steady diet of politics, sport, crime and, more recently, finance – mostly topics that are of interest to editors and media proprietors.

The dominance of this approach continues despite the fact that research – industry and academic – has shown for years that this is not what the public wants to be told about. Research has also shown undeniably that newspaper circulations and TV news audiences have generally been steadily declining on a per-capita basis since at least the early 1970s. Any business that pays scant attention to its market research is destined to struggle, as is already happening. The popularity of info-tainment TV shows and lifestyle magazines is another indication that news publications are missing part of the public interest.

This problem has become so obvious that the American Society of Newspaper Editors holds conferences to find solutions to the problem of the "disappearing reader". Notwithstanding the Naked News approach, the standard Internet response has been a plethora of independent publications that cater to the wider audience. However, a paucity of advertising revenue, and difficulty in establishing reliability and authority as branded publications, not to mention successful business models, has led to the demise of many of these. Successful ones have been snapped up by larger organisations, based on their public appeal. The much-lauded diversity of content the Internet was supposed to bring has yet to materialise.

Since few online publications have yet turned a profit, how can media organisations become more responsive and thereby increase their readerships/audiences? The answer is both simple and complex: make audience feedback an integral part of driving the news agenda. Instead of relying on theoretical "news values", research and write on the news topics that audiences demand – as opposed to being guided by the articles the audience hits on after they are written.

This solution is, of course, not universally applicable to every type of news. No reader will be able to predict their interest in local crime or disaster stories. Similarly with product releases, novelties and other types of "new" news. However, the presentation of even these stories could be re-prioritised according to feedback rather than guesswork.

This audience-driven model is best suited to magazine-style niche journalism. The kind that caters to a specialised readership. This is where the value of good information and analysis cannot be underestimated, as demonstrated by the success of financial information Web sites. I have argued elsewhere that the future of Web publishing will see an increase in specialist-topic sites.

If the public ever gets over its fear of Internet-borne privacy abuses, article packaging could be personalised using technology similar to that of Amazon.com. This technology presents a list of items of possible interest to the viewer based on items previously visited. However, news services of this type have been around for some time with limited success.

Some attempts have recently been made to involve readers in the news agenda via the New York Times’ Abuzz section and the website Askme.com. These services allow users to ask their own questions and have them answered by other members of the service. If those publications paid attention to what the audience was discussing, they may well gather some guidance as to what the audience views as important.

It is early days for both of these services but it seems that the agenda for Abuzz, contrary to the promotional material sent out about it, is being driven by the organisation, and askme.com is descending into a closed-shop forum for a small group of interested parties. These are not the outcomes required for a new model of journalism that is inclusive and sensitive to audience needs.

The key improvement, though, is that on these sites, users are not simply provided with a menu of offerings that are supposed to appeal to them. These sites are inviting their audience to ask questions that the audience finds important. This is a step towards a truly interactive information environment. To change the underlying paradigm of journalism, media organisations must make their audience feel that it is part of the process. Making themselves publicly available is not something that online (or offline) journalists welcome, as Online Journalism Review’s Jerry Lanson found out. My own experiences trying to contact journalists have been similar: if a contact point is provided for them at all, the journalists are reluctant to respond to any emails they are sent.

This is quite understandable, given the insular traditions of journalists besieged by fans, promoters or crackpots, but it does scant service to the possibilities for a new technology. If the dominant mentality of news organisations is to change, these attitudes and practices must go first.

So, how can it be done?

I don’t pretend to have any easy answers to that question. However, here are two different approaches that provide food for thought and further consideration. First, and easiest to implement, online publications could provide a feedback form to readers, on which they could specify the topics they think are important or ask questions they would like addressed by reporters. Providing forums and discussion threads attached to articles, which is a common practice, is one version of this. However, existing features only allow the audience to react to the agenda set by the publication. The organisation needs to go the next step and allow the audience to determine what will appear in the next edition.

This would require the results of the feedback forms or posts to a thread to be stored in a database and, using some form of aggregation analysis, used to deduce trends and major topics of interest or, at the least, to reprioritise the agenda for subsequent editions. This does not necessarily imply dramatic changes.

There are some obvious problems with this approach. As I write this I can hear editors groaning that readers don’t necessarily know what they want, and academics decrying the sample as statistically invalid. There is also the objection that collecting this information is not the issue, getting editors to pay attention to it, as noted above, is the hard part. Devising a workable application for this suggestion is similarly difficult. It is not feasible to simply assign a reporter to follow the request of every audience member.

The other suggestion, then, is more revolutionary and correspondingly more difficult to implement. It involves redefining the role of (at least some) reporters as "information brokers". Put simply, the organisation uses some of its vast store of information and research capacity to specifically address the information needs of readers.

The advantage of this is that production is immediately demand-driven and hence it is more likely that the person asking the question will pay for the service. As noted above, this is best suited to high-value niche information that is not easy for the general public to obtain or interpret. Reporters, on the other hand, have access to sources and archives that could be harnessed to answer specific queries.

Whether this would be profitable or not depends largely on the nature of the enquiry. For example, some searches currently performed on public libraries’ microfiche archives of past editions could be done much more quickly using a database of previous articles. To some extent, this service is already offered by some online versions of newspapers, and users have demonstrated a willingness to pay for it. In any case, if properly implemented, the service could have the secondary value outlined above.

At the higher-value end of the information spectrum, responses could harness the expertise and resources of specialist reporters and maximise the organisation’s return on their investment in creating that expertise. There are always details omitted from any story, whether because of space constraints or because they weren’t relevant to the chosen angle. Answering readers’ questions allows the reporter to provide those details to those who want them and to obtain further information to use in subsequent stories.

This model of journalists as information brokers would, of course, require a rethink about story structure and presentation. It makes no sense to sell the information to someone and then give it away in the next edition/post. Perhaps the model used by research companies such as ACNielsen – you can have the summary gratis, but the full report is gonna cost ya – might work.

It’s probably reasonable to assume that more than one person will have an interest in any given question, so the same information could possibly be sold to several readers. Promoting the fact that the research has been done may attract interest from others who didn’t initially realise their need.

And thus the news agenda becomes, in part, driven by reader interest, not solely by editorial discretion.

There are many obstacles to successfully implementing these suggestions, and there are other concepts that might work far better. The point of this argument, however, is to challenge the thinking that has led to a fixation with technological improvements to the traditional models of online journalism. These models are struggling for viability in the online environment.

Perhaps a different model that provides better service to a wider range of the target audience might be more profitable.