Time to panic? No, it's time to be creative.

For readers outside our class, this is the articles we’re reading this week.,
Maybe it's time to panic
30 Years Till Online Represent 50% of Total Newspaper Revenues

I read the first one, ”maybe it is time to panic.” It’s really long, but I LOVE it! The quote is so awesome, “What can we do that people are willing to spend something to get, even if it’s just time?”

I have a friend who is a crazy fan of Nintendo video games. He once told me that when economic people first began to predict the consumer behavior of entertainment consumption, they made a mistake. They assumed that a household would spend a fix amount of budget on entertainment like watching movies, travel, or buy toys for kids. It turns out that people don’t really spend certain amount every month. Instead, people only begin to think about buying something when they’re attracted. For example, how much does a wii console cost? 250 dollars. That’s not cheap at all. Under the model of setting certain amount of budget over entertainment, only very few household would buy a wii console. However, it’s overwhelmingly successful, because people will buy went it’s thrilling enough. On the other hand, nobody would spend even one cent on a terrible movie, even if he still have money in his wallet. I think news industry nowadays face the same destiny, people either read it, or don’t read it at all.

I know it’s a awkward analogy comparing games to news. But we need to take the young people who use iphone, ipod, pda, or laptop to retrieve news information. Besides reading news stories, what do you think she is doing? I tell you what, she is using gtalk to chat with her friend, checking her email on gmail, a browser shows that somebody just added her on facebook, and there is a small tiny browser hidden below called “NY times.”

This is the way people now retrieve information. We turn on our laptop, check email, face book, and our RSS read. If there are some news titles that we’re interested in, we might open the window. Otherwise, we turn off the laptop, or just linger on facebook.

It’s not as a lot of media thought, that people will put their website on “My Favorite,” and check every day. No way, everybody just bookmark your website and forget it. They will google your company name next time when they think of your newspaper.

The fact is, everything online is trying to get as much attention as possible. Our competitor is not the other news organization, but all the websites online. The amount of audience is unlimited, but their time is. If one spends one more minutes on facebook, he/she is going to spend one minute less on your news story. News stories need to be attractive enough to compete with other online application. It’s hard, but I guess Journalism is never a easy industry.

I hate to say that, but I guess it’s time for media to think about how to please their customer, aka the audience. For a very long time, journalists never thought about pleasing the reader, and took the readers’ appreciation for granted.

The expense may not be the accuracy of news stories, but the length, the size of pictures, or the effort spent on copy-editing. The core value of Journalism can be kept, but the form needs to be changed.

I’m not happy with the fact at all. I jump into this industry because I want to write in-depth news, investigative report, and feature writing. (Well, I’m a good writer in my first language, if you believe.) Now web has pushed everything toward faster, shorter, and easier. Lengthy stories are just too expensive.

Well, I guess as long as we can find creative business model for news industry these costly stories can still run somewhere. But before that, we need to stop complaining, panicking, and be creative.