In advertising, there is a principle that says something like: "People don't want fertilizer, they want green lawns." The idea is that ads should focus on the green lawns, not on the chemicals that made it that way because you are then giving people what they want. You are meeting their needs.
Newspapers can learn from this.
People don't want a play-by-play, inverted pyramid story on the city council meeting last night, they want to know what the decisions mean. Tell them a story if you have to, but put the news in your readers' terms, in your readers' lives. Most newspapers still cover the same ol' bureaucratic beats the same ol' ways, and modern readers are bored, bored, bored.
So newspapers, which still hold the franchise for local news -- the names and faces inherent in chronicling the quotidian -- need to continue their solid community coverage. They just need to break free from the old and embrace new ways of approaching the story(see the "experience newspaper" at readership.org).
Many changes in newspapers occur at the big papers and trickle down to the smaller. But with this more personalized approach to writing and presenting the news, I think it is the small dailies and the weeklies that can lead the way. They are less tied to the traditions of newsroom management and organization.
In many ways the future of newspapers lies with them, not with the circulation giants.
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