Every episode of Alan Partridge is brilliant but this may just be the best scene in the whole series. Desperate to impress the visiting Irish TV executives, our hero launches the most incompetent, patronising charm offensive ever seen, culminating in the wonderful section where he lists things people associate with Ireland (horses running through council estates, toothless simpletons etc).
During today’s excellent lecture by Shane Richmond, Communities Editor of Telegraph.co.uk, it struck me that when we the media establish, manage and discuss online communities there is a danger we, like Partridge, struggle to think outside our prejudices and preconceptions.
What do people really want from us?
Shane Richmond told us that the values treasured by journalists and the values users expect in online media sites are very different. He hammered home the reality that in a media landscape where the very concept of brand loyalty has been fractured and users can pick their news à la carte on an article by article basis, reassessing readers and reflecting their wants is paramount.
Part of the new role of media organisations is to facilitate the workings of online communities, which the My Telegraph site is very good at, currently hosting 30,000 bloggers. The Telegraph cottoned on quickly that most of their bloggers did not want to “be bloggers” as such when they signed up, they really just wanted to talk to other Telegraph readers.
Once again when we strip away grandiose theories about people embracing the power to publish, we are left with something much more simple.
If you were to go into any pub in the country and wander around listening to people’s conversations, you’d probably be barred. But as you were manhandled out the door, you would marvel at the range of topics that get people talking. It’s the same on the Internet.
A random look at MyTelegraph today brought up links to posts with the following titles; “Towards a typology of delinquent public service employees”, “What is your favourite recipe?” and “Will Muslims go to Heaven?”.
None of these topics would have been covered in today’s papers and yet at one point this afternoon they were three of the most read postings. The point, as Mr Richmond explained, is things that might seem unimportant, un-newsworthy or uninteresting to a hard-nosed hack have engaged thousands of people.
This 2007 article written by American digital technology professor Rich Gordon urges newspapers to think of their websites as networks rather than destinations.
Add all these network-building ideas together and I think a news site can increase its site traffic significantly — attracting new audiences, making current users come back more frequently, and increasing the time spent and pages viewed per visit.
The same ideas underpin big organisations like the Telegraph managing online communities. It struck me as telling that although Telegraph readers inundate Shane and his team with complaints about the website, they still come back again and again.
Readers’ expectations are clearly changing. Next time we reel off what we think people want from newspaper websites, we would be wise to stop and think. To paraphrase Partridge, “Der’s more to the website, dan dis.”
2 responses so far ↓
Tim Holmes // November 26, 2008 at 8:47 am |
That treasured gatekeeper and agenda-setter role is not quite as shiny as it used to be, huh?
robalderson // November 26, 2008 at 9:47 pm |
Tell me about it. I know it’s a good thing but there is a tiny part of me which wonders just how fun it used to be on Fleet Street… No time for whistful daydreaming though.