Surviving?
[stefangeens.com] How is a newspaper supposed to compete these days? Unlike websites, newspapers are not searchable, and unlike TV, the news is 12 hours old by the time people consume it. How do you survive when you are a compelling read only for those sitting on the subway or toilet?
Positioning: Covering every news item from a financial perspective pays, because the target readerships knows the value of timely news, and ponies up for online subscriptions. Many people who read the WSJ read it online first. The paper becomes merely a record of the state of the newsroom's reporting efforts at the end of the day. In line with this thinking, it has now included online subscribers in the circulation numbers.
Design: The WSJ front page has long been designed like a news website, before such things even existed. Two columns of news headlines "link" (manually) to the full articles inside — it's ideal for scanning. And then there is the New Yorker-esque piece, the A-hed, which is hewn for days if not weeks into a compelling, quirky read, teased with punny headlines. The subject matter is topical, but not breaking; unlike the NYT, the WSJ does not make the mistake of trying to rush this.
This segregation of stories gives you various ins into the paper, depending on your mood, and in that it is similar to The Economist, which can be attacked head-on via its opinionated leaders or slipped into via the more urbane back pages.
The Economist is in a sweet spot. It smudges the line between informing and opining in ways American media should emulate. Reading the editorial pieces in the WSJ and NYT, caged as they are on that one page, I get a sense that they are more strident than they should be, having to abstain as they do from contributing to the rest of the paper.
So my free advice to the NYT: For your longer pieces, try to poach some of those editors at The New Yorker or Wall Street Journal. And then flaunt your colors.
1 Comments added
Interesting comments about the "links" on the front page of the WSJ. I'd go a step further and argue that their famous "stipple" drawings are one of the most effective visual branding devices in any medium: distinctive, inimitable, characteristic. Even aspirational, in a way that probably only makes sense to the WSJ readership itself. (When I saw my father as rendered by the WSJ's artists, sometime in the mid-80's, I knew he had "made it.")
I think you've hit the nail on the head with regard to the Economist. I find its skew zesty, something to engage and dispute with glee, rather than offensive, the way I might find FOX TV.
Conversely, at the New Yorker, I find the entire book is like a warm bath: comforting, relaxing and good for you, but not the most bracing of experiences. The voice is the unifying spine here too.
But how do you extend that voice to an entire newspaper? The Murdoch papers, worldwide, embrace a viewpoint, but that viewpoint is invariably scurrilous and depressingly lowest-common-denominator. I'm not sure the deployment of color and POV throughout a paper is enough.