What I want out of my newspaper

Last week during a car ride, my dad, also a newspaper man, asked me the following question:

“How do most of the people you know get your news?”

In my family, this is what qualifies as a loaded question.

At this point, I realized I’d have to give up my search for “Boys of Summer” on the car radio, so I launched into what I knew would be a 20-minute Q&A session.

An abridged transcript follows:

Q: How do most of the people you know get your news?

A: Not newspapers, other than the student-run one. Exceptions to this are (sometimes) journalism students. It’s not that people I know don’t care about the news — it’s that they don’t think all the news packed into the daily newspaper relates to them.

Q: Do people read newspapers online?

A: Hmm … well, it depends what news they want and whether online is the most convenient medium. People read the Alligator because they can pick it up and look at it on the bus. They read it because it features people and places they know — with a community of 50,000, that isn’t hard to do. But for most news, online isn’t going away. Newspapers need to figure out how to make money off of it.

Q: Would it help if newspapers went on Facebook and MySpace?

A: Weeeeell … no. Not in their current form. It’s the format of newspapers people don’t like, not necessarily the medium. Going on Facebook, wonderful medium though it is, in the form that newspapers generally take will not work. Will it work if people get a feed of stories targeted to their interests? I’d be interested to see that.

I think newspapers need to redefine news judgment. People are interested in hearing news about people, places and things that they know. I think that’s the interest behind the hyperlocal movement, although that’s been twisted to mean “more of the same local stories.” Newspapers need to partly redefine newsworthy as “what will people be interested in?” I don’t think we need the exact same analysis of the Florida Democratic primaries in every city newspaper. Everyone’s seen that before. We need to do those stories, but we need to also do human interest stories. For instance, I would have liked to see a story in, say, the Miami Herald, looking into any local women who protested the DNC rules committee meeting. What are their backgrounds? Who are they? Where do they live? Do I know any of them?

People care about human interest stories. And those are stories you can run in your paper that no one else will have. They focus on an aspect of the story that is unique to your demographic. That’s important. News + Human interest is, I think, the way of the future.

People still want to read stories. The problem is, the Internet has inundated them with information, and information does not always equal stories. So people get buried under “BREAKING NEWS” updates, and when they see yet another story about the Democratic primaries in Florida, they gag and pass it by.

[We later discussed that part of the reason Facebook succeeds is "it's about people." Newspapers need to be about people, too.]

In summary

Newspapers need less of the same and more human interest stories, in-depth reporting and demographic-focused stories.

I know that’s not going to be a popular idea. A lot of journalists feel the vaguely parental sentiment that it’s for journalists to decide if news is good for the public, even if it might be “boring.”

But newspapers are not vegetables. The “consume it, it’s good for you, because-I-say-so” rationale doesn’t work here. My generation has to be adept at sorting through information, because there is more information available to us than we could ever take in. We will read what we are interested in.

Until newspapers realize that, the business model is going to be broken. Until they start targeting stories at demographics — which I know some would see as an ugly stepchild of advertising and journalism — people won’t find the stories they would want to read.

And that’s the biggest problem. Because if newspapers keep declining, they won’t have the budget to get what they need — and that’s just a vicious cycle.