So who’s for dinner? The attention economy is hungry

Posted by Martin Stabe on 5 April 2007 at 11:01
Tags: Blogs, Google, Journalism, Yahoo, attention economy

Many journalists still seem to misunderstand how blogs and search engines are transforming newspapers’ relationship with readers.

This week, the outgoing president of the American Society of Newspaper Editors, Dave Zeeck of the Tacoma News-Tribune, gave a speech, which, alongside some very good points, also rehearsed the common complaint about the lack of original reporting by bloggers and online aggregators:

“I’m told the blogosphere is going to eat our lunch. Well, the blogosphere, for the most part, spends its infinitely expanding gas talking about what we — newspapers — write, not what some blogger
reported.”

Zeeck continued:

It’s the same with the internet in general. When someone tells me they get their news from the internet, I want to say: ‘Oh yeah? So, tell me again, how many reporters does Yahoo have at City Hall? How many correspondents from Google are risking their lives in Iraq?

This may be true, but it doesn’t matter. Google, Yahoo and bloggers aren’t competing with newspapers on the quality of their journalism. Contrast Zeeck’s speech with the mammoth State of the News Media study published last month in the US.

“Journalism is becoming a smaller part of people’s information mix,” the report says, in an acknowledgement that as barriers to entry in publishing come down, newspapers will have to compete for readers’ eyeballs — and therefore ad revenue — with millions of tiny blogs.

Regardless of the quality of their journalism — which is often considerably higher than Zeeck gives them credit for — bloggers’ real importance is the that they represent a huge shift in this online “attention economy”. That is how bloggers could eat our lunch.

“The press is no longer gatekeeper over what the public knows,” the report continues. “Journalists have reacted relatively slowly. They are only now beginning to re-imagine their role. Their companies failed to see ‘search’ as a kind of journalism.”

Search as journalism? Yes, yes, I know, Google doesn’t have a Baghdad bureau. But that’s not the point.

What matters is that newspapers have ceased to be the first (and only) point of contact for people looking for many different types of information. Before online search, providing a one-stop source of information was a newspaper’s major selling point.

All those blogs and other specialised online news sources — not to mention sites offering free small ads, cinema listings and restaurant locations — are now far more easily accessible using search engines.

Newspapers used to be readers’ first and only point of contact for all of that diverse information. Now Google is.
This is at the heart of how the internet is disrupting newspapers’traditional business model.

“The value of newspapers isn’t, and never has been, a function of the content they create. It has always been a function of owning the relationship with the reader,” Associated Northcliffe Digital’s strategic analyst Seamus McCauley wrote on his blog, Virtual Economics, back in February when the Belgian newspaper group Copiepresse won its case against Google.

He quoted US newspaper consultant Vin Crosbie, who stresses that the “core connection between a newspaper and its readers” isn’t the news it publishes, but its “routine, automatic and intact daily delivery of everything that the reader should want to know on that day.”

By focusing on providing content rather than maintaining their status as the first port of call, wrote McCauley, newspapers are being “bumped down the value chain” in the information economy.

Newspapers’ previous position as the gateway to information has been colonised by search.

The Belgian newspapers’ attempt to sue Google was therefore focused on the wrong issue. But at least, wrote McCauley, their action is an acknowledgement that the emerging model — where newspapers concentrate on delivering content while ceding their aggregation role to portals and search engines — is unsustainable.