April 17, 2012
Newspapers are attracting older readers even on their websites
Newsosaur Alan D. Mutter speaks the painful truth about news sites:
Instead of using the web, mobile and social media to connect with new readers and customers, the typical newspaper dedicates the majority of its digital efforts to faithfully porting its print product to pixels.
Older people who are used to newspapers apparently appreciate this kind of effort, but that’s not good enough. We have to find ways of drawing in young people who are used to getting their news from sites like Reddit.
If not, news sites will suffer the same fate as newspapers. Our aging readers will eventually die off — and so will we.
Mutter has a solution that we should seriously consider:
Because most profit-pinched newspapers lack the time, money and in-house talent to develop such products, it makes sense for the industry to pool its resources to create a Digital Widget Works to build products to compete with the upstarts.
We should be looking at the type of innovation being used at ITV News in Britain. They’ve created a news site that only exist on the Internet.
Be sure to read and heed more of what Mutter has to say.