Positive signs for the future of traditional media

A respected source highlighted the The Nieman Journalism Lab; a collaborative attempt to figure out how quality journalism can survive and thrive in the Internet age. After installing their free iphone app I found this recent post: “Why SEO and audience tracking won’t kill journalism as we know it”.

The title grabbed me due to my recent online media review; How has the Pope visit impacted search and online media.

The national press have continued to modernise their online offerings and this topic has always kept me interested. It’s a similar story to traditional offline marketing; yet still today we see old school marketers managing the offline arena with separate teams working in relatively new digital departments.

I’ve not really understood the problem myself because I have experienced the benefits of traditional methods being applied online; I think the fear comes from people who have spent years crafting their style by slowly learning things which now can easily be taken for granted. However, without the background and an understanding of the craft involved with communicating clear and engaging messages, trying to be successful in the digital world is pointless.

A quote from the Nieman Journalism, SEO Audience tracking post made me smile:

“Last week, The New York Times featured the scary tale of how some newspapers, including The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal, are (shockingly!) changing their coverage after using online metrics to figure out what their audience wants to read.”

Digital journalists are now apparently doing anything to please the search engines by inserting popular search phrases such as “Lady Gaga” into their stories to gain more views. There are also new trends of pleasing the newfound big boards in newsrooms(much like call centre live call statistic boards) showing the top ten most popular blog posts ordered by page views per hour.

What exciting times! The American media has been encouraged and is leading the way, of course pages views are important as a gage but measuring the time spent on pages and the whole website will be the KPI of success.

The media is finally becoming a two way cycle; listen -> write -> monitor -> learn … which is a vast improvement on the traditional presumptions and preaching that have become tired and detrimental to the modern media. So to UK media voices and authorities, it’s not good enough to have your own Twitter account to appear as if you are ‘modern’; Use data, trends and statistics to thrive! Time to encourage ongoing comments and feedback from the audience that you probably are only just starting to understand.

The most successful online names will be the ones who create ‘internal audience evangelists’ who push and preach the benefits of audience alignment to bring new digital visitors who will obviously please the advertisers and key stakeholders.

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