Readers want source they can trust

Philip Meyer, the Knight Chair in Journalism at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hil and Washington correspondent of the Beacon Journal 1962-1966, still knows how to write a good lead.

Here’s the lead on his latest thoughts on newspapers in the October/November issue of American Journalism Review:

By Philip Meyer
The endgame for newspapers is in sight. How their owners and managers choose to apply their dwindling resources will make all the difference in the nature of the ultimate product, its service to democracy and, of course, its survival.

Meyer in December 1995 in another article urged stakeholders in newspaper companies to accept the inevitability of lower returns and to apply their resources to maintaining their community influence. A decade later he wrote a took titled “The Vanishing Newspaper: Saving Journalism in the Information Age.”

Most took away the wrong message, Meyer writes today. Even he underestimated the velocity of the Internet effect.

“It is now clear that it is as disruptive to today's newspapers as Gutenberg's invention of movable type was to the town criers, the journalists of the 15th century.”

The old town crier’s audience was limited to the number of people who could be assembled and the newspaper changed everything, Meyer writes. And now the intenet moves information with zero cost..

So how do you compete:? By narrowing your focus, Meyer suggests.

What service supplied by newspapers is the least vulnerable?

Here is Meyer’s conclusion?:

I still believe that a newspaper's most important product, the product least vulnerable to substitution, is community influence. It gains this influence by being the trusted source for locally produced news, analysis and investigative reporting about public affairs. This influence makes it more attractive to advertisers.

By news, I don't mean stenographic coverage of public meetings, channeling press releases or listing unanalyzed collections of facts. The old hunter-gatherer model of journalism is no longer sufficient. Now that information is so plentiful, we don't need new information so much as help in processing what's already available. Just as the development of modern agriculture led to a demand for varieties of processed food, the information age has created a demand for processed information. We need someone to put it into context, give it theoretical framing and suggest ways to act on it.

The raw material for this processing is evidence-based journalism, something that bloggers are not good at originating.

Not all readers demand such quality, but the educated, opinion-leading, news-junkie core of the audience always will. They will insist on it as a defense against "persuasive communication," the euphemism for advertising, public relations and spin that exploits the confusion of information overload. Readers need and want to be equipped with truth-based defenses.

Click on the headline to read Meyer’s article.