Shop your way to success

Most journalism publishers around the world try to set the daily news agenda and lead public opinion. For more than two centuries they have tried to choose and publish reports, images and features which they think will attract their existing known audience members and hopefully new ones too. 

In the late 1990s things in the journalism world began to change. Newspaper readers began to drift away from their daily shot of paper and ink; television and radio audiences began to dwindle. Ten years later this retreat had turned into a full-scale rout and we were left scratching our heads about how to make a living in journalism.

Then, in the spring of 2005, I had an idea. Surely making a living in journalism means enticing people to buy your product, or at least to invest time in it? Perhaps it would be a good idea to find out what people were already buying and investing their time in.

I started asking people for their shopper dockets and collecting my own. And so was born my new book Shopping News, 10 years in the making and released last month by Melbourne’s Australian Scholarly Publishing.

The driving idea seemed simple enough: to find out what people want to buy and can afford, and see whether this knowledge holds any secrets for us in journalism. I found out one or two more things along the way.

I learned that people all over the world will pay one level of price for things they regard as essential to their daily lives, another (slightly more) for things they think will help them maintain their lifestyle as they like it – now – and they will pay the most for things they think will change and improve their lives.

All shopkeepers know this, but my mob – journalists – are not shopkeepers. So I became determined to discover the secret knowledge of shopping and apply that in journalism. I discovered 16 ways to do this and they’re all in the book.

But the really big new secrets of Shopping News were under our journalistic noses all the time and we never knew it. This is probably because these ideas come from the world of mathematics, something which most journalists don’t really “love” (to say the very least).

I learned that we now live in a networked world and we can learn about it using ourselves as lab rats. Using soundly-based networking tools that I researched, developed and tested for Shopping News, it is possible – indeed easy – to figure out what customers in our towns and cities want by interrogating ourselves and our networks.

I call these tools the Shopping News Kitchen Table™ and the Audience Soundtrack Analyser™.

Just about every reporter, sub-editor, producer and researcher in every newsroom in the world is a member of a vast array of networks whether online or offline. Thanks to computing and algorithms similar to those used by social media companies but downsized to your standard computer environment, it is possible to model and visualise patterns in those networks which tell us journalists important information about our communities and our customers.

Market researchers tell us what people say they want; shopping information tells us where people actually put their money down, how much, and for what.

The last lesson I learned in Shopping News presents a tough pill for most news directors to swallow. All my career – and for decades before it, according to the history books – editors have hired people who think like them and act like them.

But network theory shows very clearly that this stifles innovation, change and improvement. Nature and computing networks seek out the different because when you combine different things, you get new things.

I’m calling this The Secret of New.

Some of the details in my research reveal that all shopkeepers display their goods according to range and price because they know that’s how people make their buying decisions. This is especially easy to do in the digital world, as we see every day in ITunes and EBay.

But I have yet to find a news publication or website which attempts to do this and the reason is that we journalists have not seen our reports as products – even though our customers do. Even our employers do, but journalists have not been trained to do this.

This tiny lack in our professional formation has had important consequences: we have never developed the ability to accurately price these individual products called news stories. As I point out in Shopping News, publishers and their accountants know exactly how much a news story costs but there’s no evidence they know how much one should sell for on its own. So they bundle them together in newspapers, TV and radio bulletins, and subscription websites and let the customer decide whether or not to part with her money at the door, just like the last time I ate-in at an all-you-can-eat restaurant and had to pay at the door on the way in, not on the way out.

And there’s no evidence that those publishers and accountants who do know how much a story costs to make, have ever passed that information on to journalists on staff.

I learned that shopkeepers actually work hard to sell you things but we journalists only work hard to make things. We’re very much like farmers and other primary producers who work hard all day and then wonder why they’re stiffed with a lower price than they really want for their goods.

Farmers who grow their own produce, then add value by packaging, pricing and arranging it in beautiful market stalls, are everywhere in the world that journalists are, and as far as I can tell they are doing better at bringing home the bacon.

Most shoppers – and 80 percent of buying decisions are made by women – read the label before they buy an item, whether it’s a $2 bottle of mineral water or a $20,000 car. News products don’t have labels but anyone reading Shopping News will find out why they should in future. On a label you can read about an item’s quality and ingredients … how accurate it is, for instance.

I also learned that better signs would work well for news organisations – signs that tell you what’s for sale and encourage you to buy.

And I strongly suggest that journalists get into the customer engagement and customer relationship business. I have lost count of the number of people whose most recent experience with a journalist was likely to be their last. Who would go back to a shopkeeper like that?

This is an interactive project and the interaction starts here: read the book and tell me what you think.