Newspapers: Don't lecture your audience, and don't blame them either

Dr. Gabriel Huddleston on Twitter last week:

This is more relevant to the newspaper industry than you first might realize.

I have what may be an unpopular opinion in my racket, but I’m uneasy with the “support local journalism/subscribe to your local paper” push I see a lot on social media.

Now, I say this with the caveat that of course I support local journalism, understand its importance. But what I see in these tweets is a “you NEED to subscribe,” message that has “if reporters lose their jobs, if a story isn’t covered the way it should be, then it’s your fault for not subscribing.” subtext

I hate the subtext. In part because it’s incomplete. Even companies that have good subscription numbers are suffering. The Athletic has, at worst, very stable numbers and laid off 8 percent of its work force. The Atlantic also had rising subscriber numbers and still had layoffs.

That’s the larger point of news economics. Systemically, things are broken. It’s broken from a system that has incentivized corporate ownership and corporate conglomerates and consolidation for years. It’s broken from a system in which these companies take on too much debt as part of sales and never recover. It’s broken from a system that was built for a media era of scarcity rather than the current era of abundance.

It’s broken long before it gets to the consumer and their subscription decision.

The core of my subscription-pocalypse hypothesis from the end of 2018 is that, with the growth of streaming media services combined with the emergence of national newspapers centering themselves as an anti-Trump voice to podcasts and other creative work being subsidized by monthly donations and subscriptions, your local newspaper is naturally going to be the one left out. Are you really going to cancel Netflix or Hulu to subscribe to your local paper? Are you going to spend the money on subscribing to the New York Times or your local paper?

For a lot of people, it’s not a question of and. It’s a question of or.

We can’t assume people can afford both.

And to tell people they should? Well, maybe. But I always come back to the Jeff Jarvis quote that no successful business model was every framed around the word “should.” Lecturing your audience is a non-starter in a media age of abundance. You have to give them a reason to subscribe. It’s an opportunity to define your work and your community, to listen to them. Not to lecture.

And not to pass the buck from the institutional problems that are hurting journalism