What Do Readers Want?

As Time magazine aptly noted by making "You" its Person of the Year, everyone on the Internet has a voice and no longer needs to vault the entry barrier posed by a newspaper's heavily edited and sometimes censored Letters to the Editor page. Gannett's Carroll says this is forcing a huge shift in how papers view their readers. "We have the opportunity to be much more democratic than we've ever been before," she says.

Innosight's Anthony says this change epitomizes another disruptive technology concept: A business's relationship with potential customers can change abruptly. In these conditions, he says, identifying new customers can be baffling and requires a lot of trial and error.

Newspapers, for instance, have been using customization tools to gain a better understanding of what their readers want and need. The New York Times is beta testing My Times, which allows users to create a personal homepage with stories on their favourite topics and by their favourite writers — even if they are from competing news sources.

At the Seattle Times, users can move content blocks — from business, sports, arts, local news — up and down the page in the order they find most desirable. "No one really uses it," says Seattletimes.com's Farrar. "But we're constantly evolving" and trying new things.

In Indiana, the Gannett-owned Indianapolis Star launched a Web site called IndyMoms.com, an outlet for mothers to discuss, post and read relevant content. It has not only helped editorial hit a niche customer, but the advertising department has reaped the benefits. "We're able to say to advertisers, 'If you're interested in young women, especially mothers, we are now growing our audience and we have numbers to show the extensive traffic,'" says Carroll.

Digital Deliverance's Crosbie says that newspapers have just begun to scratch the surface of the customization tools available to them. "I'm a Formula One and soccer fan, but I can't get that stuff in the New York Times, which I subscribe to," Crosbie says. "But I know they have the stories, because I used to be the Reuters executive who sold them the soccer and racing wire."

Doom, Gloom Haunt Nation's Newsrooms

The newspaper industry's failures are by no means unique. They are simply a tangible example of an old industry that did not adapt to a disruptive technology.

While it's easy to blame newspaper executives for their paralysis during the late 1990s and the early part of this century, UNC's Meyer says, that explanation unfairly absolves the many shareholders and investors who were placing short-term demands on them to perform and who didn't encourage long-term investments in technology.

Others believe newspapers will die simply because they are too stuck-up to change their business models, fearing they'll lose their journalistic souls in the process — a theory disputed by many in the industry. "There's this notion that older print guys are dinosaurs just slowly slinking away," says the Times' Thurm. "It really hasn't been that way at all."

And he has a point. NYTimes.com attracts hundreds of millions of page views per month from all over the world — and that doesn't happen without its employees (some of whom used to work only in print) stepping up and producing excellent work. No matter how much a business has been disrupted by a new technology, customers always respond to quality.