Emily Bell: Go where the audience is

A couple of nice points here from Emily Bell’s lecture to University College Falmouth, where she is a visiting lecturer. (The rest of the time Emily is director of digital content at Guardian News and Media.)

Clue one – any communication organisation needs an audience. So find one. If you build it they won’t come because they are busy elsewhere.
So go where the audiences is.

The idea that we can shepherd viewers or readers or listeners into one place at one time is gone – we all consume our news comment and analysis through many, many different sources.

If your audience is declining as it is for primetime analogue tv, newspapers, and radio stations, but reading, watching, listening is growing, as it really is, then go where the growth is, be on all platforms. Use Twitter, Facebook, mobile, youtube, podcasts, email and sms. Don’t be afraid to let your content go – what’s the worst that could happen.

Do not just do more of the same – Einstein’s definition of insanity was to do the same thing over and over again expecting different results.

Clue two – networks work better than silos. Rules of networks are that if you are a hub not a destination your traffic will be higher….the same is true of media outlets, the same is true of individual journalists or stories – if you are at the centre of your community not on the periphery, many people will go through you.

Clue three – utility and reliability never go out of fashion and trustworthiness and transparency are crucial. When people know you will tell them something useful they will seek you out, when they know you are trustworthy they will tell you things so you can tell others.
And journalism means journalists – trust is placed in people as well as brands.

Robert Peston, the BBC’s business editor is an exponent of this – he is a tall poppy who has gathered a following which gives him 1m hits on every blog post – people want to find the good stuff and to have a personal relationship with a trusted source.

The internet allows that. But Robert Peston has a following because he is very well informed by his sources and can tell you things which, on the whole, other people can’t. He is a classic example of where the BBC, the country’s largest journalistic employer, is moving from a bulletin led model to a correspondent led model. They pay Peston to spend time understanding complex stories and cultivating sources… This is basic stuff but oh so important, and there can be no better use of a news organisation’s resource than allowing its journalists that space and time.

Clue four – Wikipedia is often a better historical source on news stories than news organisations themselves. There are two lessons here – one is that the news business is struggling to understand the language of the web, the second is that tools plus users equals content, both are key to the future of journalism.

The rest is here.