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Death by focus groups
The Inquirer and the arts
Dan Rottenberg
The Inquirer's news hole is shrinking— again— and so the Inquirer is cutting its arts coverage— again. As SaraKay Smullens reports (click here), the Inquirer recently chased away its last full-time theater critic (by exiling him to South Jersey!) and is now down to three full-time arts writers— this at a time when arts activity in Philadelphia is flourishing as never before.
SaraKay fears that reduced coverage will hurt Philadelphia's theater groups, as indeed it may. I tend to agree that the Inquirer's 20-year retreat from arts coverage constitutes a real failure of editorial imagination.
On the other hand, to my mind, lamenting the Inquirer's anemic arts coverage is like complaining about the musical selections chosen by the Titanic's band as the passengers were loaded into the lifeboats. Print newspapers are in trouble today for the same reason that ferry boat operators, typewriter manufacturers and Western Union are in trouble. Their resources are shrinking and they're making many panicky decisions as they try to adjust to a world in which most people can live without them.
"'News you can use'
The transition from print to the Web is wrenching for readers as well as publishers, but I submit that sometime between now and the end of time— and more likely in the next two or three years— someone will figure out a model for providing knowledgeable, sophisticated and economically viable arts coverage on the web.
That said, the Inquirer has an unfortunate history of misusing the feedback it gets from focus groups, to its long-term detriment. In the 1980s it readily obliged when focus groups indicated that readers wanted less political news and more "news you can use." A decade later, with circulation still plummeting, another round of research revealed that people who care about politics and their community in fact constitute the core of a newspaper's devoted readership.
Now the Inquirer's focus groups say they want more suburban coverage. I can't wait to see what the next batch of focus groups has to say ten years hence, assuming the Inky is still publishing.
The Journal's first survey
The fact is that readers don't really know what they want. When Henry Luce launched Time in 1923, was anyone clamoring for a newsmagazine? When Hugh Hefner started Playboy in 1953, was anyone demanding a combination of fiction, grooming tips and photos of naked women? When Harrison Salisbury created the op-ed page at the New York Times in 1970, did anyone even know what an op-ed page was?
Come to think of it, did any focus group demand Broad Street Review when we started it in 2005?
When I was at the Wall Street Journal in the late 1960s, the paper conducted one of its first readership surveys. It revealed, among other things, that only 10 percent of the paper's readers ever looked at the commodities page— a daily collection of price charts and commentary about the markets in eggs, butter and pork bellies.
Some news executives might conclude from such a statistic that the commodities page is expendable. The Journal's editors reached the opposite conclusion. At a paper with 2 million circulation, they reasoned, the 10 percent figure meant that 200,000 people were reading the commodities page every day— and for those 200,000, the commodities page was probably the most important part of the paper.
So the commodities page stayed, because the Journal was run not by focus groups but by people willing to exercise judgment.
SaraKay fears that reduced coverage will hurt Philadelphia's theater groups, as indeed it may. I tend to agree that the Inquirer's 20-year retreat from arts coverage constitutes a real failure of editorial imagination.
On the other hand, to my mind, lamenting the Inquirer's anemic arts coverage is like complaining about the musical selections chosen by the Titanic's band as the passengers were loaded into the lifeboats. Print newspapers are in trouble today for the same reason that ferry boat operators, typewriter manufacturers and Western Union are in trouble. Their resources are shrinking and they're making many panicky decisions as they try to adjust to a world in which most people can live without them.
"'News you can use'
The transition from print to the Web is wrenching for readers as well as publishers, but I submit that sometime between now and the end of time— and more likely in the next two or three years— someone will figure out a model for providing knowledgeable, sophisticated and economically viable arts coverage on the web.
That said, the Inquirer has an unfortunate history of misusing the feedback it gets from focus groups, to its long-term detriment. In the 1980s it readily obliged when focus groups indicated that readers wanted less political news and more "news you can use." A decade later, with circulation still plummeting, another round of research revealed that people who care about politics and their community in fact constitute the core of a newspaper's devoted readership.
Now the Inquirer's focus groups say they want more suburban coverage. I can't wait to see what the next batch of focus groups has to say ten years hence, assuming the Inky is still publishing.
The Journal's first survey
The fact is that readers don't really know what they want. When Henry Luce launched Time in 1923, was anyone clamoring for a newsmagazine? When Hugh Hefner started Playboy in 1953, was anyone demanding a combination of fiction, grooming tips and photos of naked women? When Harrison Salisbury created the op-ed page at the New York Times in 1970, did anyone even know what an op-ed page was?
Come to think of it, did any focus group demand Broad Street Review when we started it in 2005?
When I was at the Wall Street Journal in the late 1960s, the paper conducted one of its first readership surveys. It revealed, among other things, that only 10 percent of the paper's readers ever looked at the commodities page— a daily collection of price charts and commentary about the markets in eggs, butter and pork bellies.
Some news executives might conclude from such a statistic that the commodities page is expendable. The Journal's editors reached the opposite conclusion. At a paper with 2 million circulation, they reasoned, the 10 percent figure meant that 200,000 people were reading the commodities page every day— and for those 200,000, the commodities page was probably the most important part of the paper.
So the commodities page stayed, because the Journal was run not by focus groups but by people willing to exercise judgment.
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