Research: Tweeters love news

More encouraging news yet re: online usage and news.
Pew Research found that 76% of tweeters are reading newspapers online. "Twitter users are just as likely as other to consume news, but are more likely to do so on the internet and more likely to get online news through a smart phone."
This finding appears to solidify the argument that what is affecting newspapers today is not loss of readership but loss of revenue. We need to focus on revenue generation rather than focusing on what I consider to be a straw man argument that recent closures, bankruptcies and mergers show that "newspapers are dying."
They are morphing with different delivery mechanisms but arguably not fast enough. Rather than look for the magic bullet we need to address the "long tail" application of fulfilling our community needs to provide different kinds of news using different methods of delivery.
Pew Research on tweeting

#3 newspaper thought: Rock and river = landscape

#3 thought from NAA interviews:

CHARLOTTE HALL: senior vice president and editor, Orlando Sentinel, and president, American Society of Newspaper Editors:

 (The successful newspaper of the future) stops the clock once a day and takes an assessment, offering the kind of in-depth and analytical work that the 24/7 breaking news world on the Web cannot provide. Print is good at the things the Web is not good at—watchdog, explanatory, enterprise, narrative storytelling. The two media complement one another. One is the flowing river, changing constantly; the other is the rock on the shore, fixed and solid.

MY TAKE: The successful small to medium sized news enterprises will look at the web product differently than the newspaper -- not unlike how we view the difference between our magazines and our newspapers. To expand on Ms. Hall's description, online flows with breaking news (not features nor depth and analysis), databases of community information for day-to-day decision making (ratings of local mechanics, day care centers, where to eat tonight), archives (past editions and stories), deep and wide links to community information (online directory with depth of access more than phone numbers and addresses), and local/local social networks of community gathering niches (mom to mom, teen to teen) facilitated by the news enterprise.

#2 newspaper mission: No more one size fits all

Thought #2 from NAA interviews

TIM McGUIRE: Frank Russell Chair, Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication, Arizona State University in Phoenix, and former editor and senior vice president, Star Tribune in Minneapolis:

 Print publishers need to totally rethink what they are doing and [ask]:

• Do I want to deliver eyeballs to customers, or do I want to entice customers to pay for the product or a combination of the two? How do I support the news gathering I want to do?
• Is this a mass endeavor, or it is targeted? What are the information opportunities for that market?
• What is my role in the democratic process? If you want one, go for it. If you want to be all Britney [Spears], all the time, chuck the democracy façade.
• What are the market’s information needs and potentials?
• What is it that we can do for our market that nobody else can, and how valuable will that be to the market? If it is a commodity product, I can’t charge much. If it is truly special and distinguishable, the value of my product is greater.
• Invent a new product that is not tied to yesterday but is tied to serving your market or community. Create and add value that meets the market’s needs.

MY TAKE: It may be time to explore separate print products for separate customers. Those who want and act with a vested interest in developing community and partaking in democracy would get one type of product; those who need information to conduct their day to day lives with information of a different sort, get another product. Define the market, link up the advertisers who want to reach those markets and put out your products.

#1 newspaper mission: Concise, compelling

Captured thought #1 from interviews with NAA

 ALAN MUTTER: blogger, Reflections of a Newsosaur (http://newsosaur.blogspot.com) and managing partner, Tapit Partners, an information technology consulting firm)

Although the newspaper generates 90 percent of a typical publisher’s sales, it is a mistake to think of it as the “core product.” The true core products of a newspaper company are its abilities to produce compelling content, build large audiences, sell advertising and make a profit. The publishers who succeed in the future will be agnostic about the platforms they use to capitalize on those core strengths.

The traditional, one-size-fits-all newspaper should be a concise, reasonably comprehensive and extremely well-organized guide to the community. It should leverage the strengths of print: deep reporting, thoughtful analysis, fine writing and elegant visuals. 

It should avoid the weaknesses of print by de-emphasizing warmed-over coverage of stale, widely reported news."

MY TAKE: Stop calling it newspapers, then. The print components -- newspapers, magazines, tabloids -- these are print and very distinguishable from online. To be discussed on Thought #3.