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.