The public often rebukes newspapers for excessive similarities, and for talking about the same thing at the same time. For their part, printed media stick to a common core of information, based on the good old concept of being complete generalist reference daily papers, newspapers whose very nature is to reach out to all audiences.
Costly, complex and uncreative in terms of added value, this generalist mission is not actually required by audiences, who have not relied on a single source of information for decades, and have no qualms putting together their own generalist cocktail.
In an excellent interview given to Libération, Marcus Brauchli, Managing Editor at the Washington Post, shared his vision of his mission. “We don’t necessarily need to do everything that we used to in the past. We will no longer be the newspaper of reference, because honestly, that no longer exists. Being everything to everyone is a recipe for disaster. With answers to everything, the Internet has become the reference daily.”
This incompatibility between the allocation of resources and an audience’s expectation of added value is in keeping with similar issues in the industry: it points to an inability to consider change as necessary and natural. And this in a general framework, where despite facts which show its decline, people are still wondering whether the underlying problem needs resolving.
To address it, there are two strategies. Newspapers can persist in the hope that audiences will change their minds in the long term, thereby risking a death sentence. Or evolve, aligning their strategy with the creation of added value, while coming to terms with the necessity for constant evolution. The newspaper which saw President Nixon fall has chosen: “We must endlessly innovate by considering what we are offering our readers.”
In more practical terms, the WaPo’s editorial strategy may be summarized by a return to the very fundamentals of journalism – to what sparks an editor’s initial curiosity, to creating added value which will be unique to the media, and to “giving more time and space to our writers to devote themselves to original, important, ambitious journalism.”
As often, it comes down to questioning roles, to considering social missions in light of a process which cannot be seen as fixed, even if the times were not so rife with upheaval. “These last years, we have seriously considered what we are and what we must become.”
Some media will always follow this line of approach, coming to original conclusions and redefining the bases of a strong identity. Others will hope that the crisis will pass, seeing these questions as pointless. All must remember that their audience has already begun voicing strong answers.