Let’s start with what Leonard Downie Jr. and Michael Schudson got right in “The Reconstruction of American Journalism,” their ballyhooed and much-discussed report on the state and future of journalism.

• There are no easy answers.

There is unlikely to be any single new economic model for supporting news reporting. page 75

It seems like many in the industry are still searching for a silver bullet that will end their current economic troubles and allow them to return to the financial glory days of the 1980s and ’90s. They won’t find it, because to raise revenue in a diverse, new media world each news organization needs to offer a product that meets the needs of their specific market. And what news consumers want in New York City might be different from the interests of consumers in Youngstown, Ohio or Stockton, Calif.

Instead of searching in vain for that silver bullet, news organizations could take a step towards creating a business plan for the future by studying consumers in their markets. Find out what consumers actually want, need and are willing to support and use that to develop a business strategy. As Politico Editor John Harris says in the report:

…“you have to offer what people would pay for.” page 49

News executives in Los Angeles might discover that there is revenue in paid content, while Baltimore might need a network of niche Web sites backed by targeted advertising and small-town Indiana might support a hyper-local newspaper.

• We need to market the news.

More should be done—by journalists, nonprofit organizations, and
governments—to increase the accessibility and usefulness of public
information collected by federal, state, and local governments, to
facilitate the gathering and dissemination of public information by
citizens, and to expand public recognition of the many sources of
relevant reporting. page 94

The study’s authors go on to write that reporters need to do more to increase the community’s participation in news-gathering and analysis, citing Minnesota Public Radio’s Public Insight Network and the blogs on Talking Points Memo as among the examples of news outlets already doing this well. That begins with letting community members know we want to hear from them. In other words, we need to market ourselves and our services.

Unfortunately, as I’ve written before, we as an industry are terrible at marketing. This is largely because we continue to believe that marketing is beneath us and that consumers must know who we are because we are their local news outlets.

If we want to draw more consumers and get them involved in the production of news, we need to get over ourselves and do more to creatively market our product.

I’ll discuss what Downie/Schudson got wrong in my next post.

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