Will content marketing save journalism by killing it?
Legacy media journalism, we hardly knew ye:
- ABC News was "in crisis" Wednesday as it tried to explain—without explaining—how it mistakenly accused former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort of killing five people when it aired a five-second chyron fail during a live special report on the president's immigration executive order. America's first citizen-journalist president wasted no time responding with another "fake news" shot across ABC's foundering bow.
- The U.S. Postal Service's late-March annual report on mail volume and uses once again illustrates the withering reach of traditional paid magazine advertising. Magazine ad dollars took a sharp decline in real per capita spending beginning in the recession of 2001. Although growth resumed in 2004, it lasted but two years, until the next recession of 2007 sent it plummeting to the lowest level in decades, drastically shrinking the revenues and profitability of the magazine industry. Since 2009 spending has fallen another 50 percent.
- The Pew Research Center reported in a study Monday that just a fourth of U.S. adults were able to tell the difference between fact and opinion in the news. Pew's poll of just over 5,000 Americans gave them a list of statements of fact, like "spending on Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid make up the largest portion of the U.S. federal budget," and a list of opinions, like "democracy is the greatest form of government." Only 26 percent could correctly pick out all factual statements; 35 percent correctly identified the opinions. About one in four got most or all wrong.
Traditional news media may be on a long and painful downward spiral. But if you're willing to expand your definition of "journalism" to fit the times, content marketers can take some cues from those who have studied the underlying causes of the three-decade self-written obit of the American newspaper.
Philip Meyer's The Vanishing Newspaper: Saving Journalism in the Information Age remains one of the best. Although better known for his emphasis on driving new journalism by using data and Internet-assisted reporting, Meyer was pioneering in attempting to use a data scientist's critical eye to answer the perpetually unanswered question that should have been keeping the best of us in journalism up at night: Does quality journalism really matter to the publisher's bottom line?
His research that founded The Vanishing Newspaper flogged the relatively scarce hard data to within an inch of its life, but Meyer did manage to draw some important conclusions. While he aimed at the traditional newspaper daily market he was trying to save, Meyer accidently hit the content-marketing industry with his suggestions as to where to look in order to save the journalism of tomorrow:
It's all about trust. Newspapers do best when they operate in places where they are trusted by their readers. Meyer found a predicable—if not always strong—connection between reader trust in local media and the publisher's profitability. It's a virtuous cycle: Media achieves influence by investing in building that trust by becoming a reliable and high-quality information provider which readers reward by reading and engaging, which funds further investment. "The resulting higher quality earns more public trust in the newspaper, and not only larger readership and circulation but also influence with which advertisers will want their names associated," he argued. "Because trust is a scarce good," he suggests, "it could be a natural monopoly." Though Meyer's ongoing concern was the public trust surrounding civic engagement and democratic government, a convincing case can be made that the same virtuous cycle applies to building trust within the narrower sphere of commercial-driven content marketing. The tools are the same.
Narrow sells. The advertising market is aiming at ever narrower audiences, Meyer suggested, and that tightening focus gives a trusted medium an advantage, even when facing new competition (read: Internet competition). It's no secret CPM and the tactic of shotgunning material at the most number of eyeballs died decades ago—even if some marketers remain too vested in it to let it lie down. The trouble is that its poltergeist keeps returning in the form of like-counting and retweet-tallying. Meyer was searching instead for a clearer measure of influence, what a content marketer would call engagement, and—most importantly—its effect on profit. As an advocate of old-school news dailies, he misses the real opportunity for tomorrow's journalism-by-content-marketing: Narrowing that virtuous trust cycle not around continuously fragmenting audience demographics, which anyone involved in vertical publishing over the last 50 years understands instinctively, but instead around the problem the editorial is setting out to solve, what we call micro-vertical publishing. That's the fertile journalistic ground for content marketers who are paying attention to the underlying information needs of their increasingly diverse audience(s) today.
Influence is critical, but vanishingly hard to measure. Meyer falls back again on community affiliation and trust as key measures of a media's influence. But consider the tools content marketers have to do the same of their journalism. Ask yourself the same questions the research has tried to ask of news media audiences. Do your content customers consider you:
- Fair in your reporting, or unfair?
- Unbiased, or biased?
- Transparent in telling the whole story, or opaque in hiding parts?
- Accurate, or inaccurate?
- Trustworthy, or untrustworthy?
- Devoted to the community, or devoted to yourself?
- Concerned with the good of the customer, or only out to make a buck?
Accuracy fosters that trust. Accuracy in storytelling does count. But Meyer discovered a more interesting aspect. His research showed not only a direct effect—that is to say, readers who perceived accuracy in reporting were more willing to trust the medium—but also a more critical indirect effect. The perception of accuracy was most often mediated through people with firsthand knowledge of the reported events. Intuitively, it makes sense, the people you use as sources in your material are the most attuned to whether you got it right or wrong. This insight deftly wielded in the hands of a content marketer can be used as a powerful tool, when you involve the relatively narrow sphere of influencers and then put that involvement to use in promoting your accuracy, and by extension, your trustworthiness.
Clarity counts. Papers that are easy to read have better audience penetration than newspapers that are hard to read. So, clear writing is still important, Meyer found, and his data gave lie to the old prejudice that we should "write up" to a higher-educated, presumably more-affluent audience. It doesn't cost readership to write down. But Meyer's research says nothing about the other powerful tools of clear, simple and economic storytelling, like graphics, video and pictures. All must contribute to telling the story clearly.
It's about the information. Newspapers made (and make) money by owning the tollgate through which information passes between retailers and their customers. In the old days, owning a local newspaper was like owning the gate. "For most of the twentieth century, that bottleneck was virtually absolute," he writes. "Owning the newspaper was like having the power to levy a sales tax." The problem: It's no longer an exclusive tollgate. And that's the great news for the content marketer. It's a lesson that came late to too many in the legacy trade vertical press where the "bright line" between editorial and sales staffs was so sacrosanct that it too often cut off the best and brightest sources of cutting-edge information living in the R&D and even marketing departments of the companies that advertised. So while publishers begged companies to buy ad space to expose their brand to eyeballs, they simultaneously slammed the door on passing along the information readers were really begging for. Trade publishing withered as a result. Content marketers, wealthy with good information and the new-media tools and willingness to use them, now have the best of both journalistic worlds: monopoly on information, and monopoly on the media to distribute it, with little or no need for the traditional middleman. That's what real, healthy, meaningful journalism looks like today.
New journalists, agree or disagree?