But do customers want platforms?

longwords · **Posted:** Sat Jan 19, 2008 10:59 pm

Quote:

The Gazette in Cedar Rapids, IA, is looking for an Editor who will transform our approach to news, the way we deliver it, and our relationships with customers in this thriving region of eastern Iowa.

Weâ€™re seeking a journalist with solid skills and experience who now â€œlivesâ€ in the digital, interactive, multimedia world. The successful candidate will have a passion for understanding and responding to the needs of our customers, reaching them with news and information on multiple platforms. A demonstrated record of innovation and a dedication to community-powered news are imperative.

This job description isn't necessarily a problem, but I do wonder if this newspaper actually knows what its paying customers want. One of the issues with the customers at my paper is that more than a few are Anabaptists (Mennonite, Amish, or in one of the conservative Brethren sects). As far as I know, they aren't checking the Internet every day, although many businesses do have faxes. (Mennonite farmers around here seem to have fax machines in the barn, not in the house.)

We put information on the web, in the daily paper, and in the weeklies. Sometimes I wonder if we actually know who our various audiences are. I hope the person who gets the job listed above actually knows which people want which services.

Heartodixie · **Posted:** Sun Jan 20, 2008 12:15 am

Yuuup. Same thing here. We cover lots of rural areas, but our guys refuse to acknowledge that the vast majority of people who would get our paper if we gave a shit about them are poor and/or lacking high-speed Internet access. Guy I'm dating, for example, lives exactly seven miles from my "urban" downtown house, but he can't get anything but dialup because cable and wireless companies don't see any point to providing service for two people in a rural county. He gets the paper edition of our paper and won't touch the Web site because all the bells and whistles we have on it make it too slow to navigate via phone line. And he's a computer and gizmo maniac.

LAEdtr · **Posted:** Sun Jan 20, 2008 4:13 am

This dilemma has yet to be answered in big cities as well. Plenty of folks like to read on their work break, at the park or in bed, and computers aren't part of those equations. I fear we won't know the solution until the question stops being asked.

Editer · **Posted:** Sun Jan 20, 2008 12:53 pm

Indeed. One of my colleagues here is designing a study to try to find out why people (young people especially) don't use mobile devices such as smart phones to read the news, when they easily could. (I have some guesses, and so do most people, but there's not been much research pinning it down.) Another is writing her dissertation on how younger demographics read and seek out news.

Finding out how people will actually get the news you publish isn't a simple process; when you ask what they want or intend to get, the answers, even if given in good faith, often don't match up with what they end up doing in real life. A telephone survey won't find many people such as the Amish who don't have phones but may gladly read a newspaper regularly. Most phone surveys undersample cellphone users; it's relatively simple to adjust the responses through weighting on politics and so forth, but surveys involving use of mobile devices themselves are more problematic.

And the technology and its implementations are changing every month.

So every paper out there is trying something. Some things will work and some won't. But they don't know until after they try, and there's a lot of guesswork involved.

I suppose what I'm saying is, let's be wary of critiques and mockery in this unsettled landscape. No one has 20/20 foresight.

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But do customers want platforms?

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