On providing valuable content

Robert Niles tells newsrooms what they need to do to stay relevant in his Online Journalism Review piece, Walt Disney vs. the news industry: How bad management is killing newspapers and their websites.

The audience doesn’t care about saving newsroom jobs or keeping journalists in journalism. Nor should it. The people who provide true value to the audience will be the ones who will be able to earn money from that audience. That was true in Walt’s day and remains true today. If people won’t pay for your content online, maybe that should tell you the content you’re delivering doesn’t provide enough value to the audience.

A big reason why the audience is turning to local blogs is because of the hyper-local coverage and sense of community they create. Rather than reprint the same 10 Associated Press headlines and then post them on the paper’s web site, online newspapers would do — or would have done — well to embrace this community model.