Merc begins massive redesign/rethink effort
Sam Gustin of Conde Nast Portfolio blogged this afternoon about The San Jose Mercury News’ effort to rethink its product.
The newspaper, long the preeminent authority on technology news, has launched an initiative called “Rethinking the Mercury News” that will be the subject of a paper-wide meeting this afternoon at its headquarters in San Jose.
At a time when many newspapers are staggering around like punch-drunk boxers trying to find a business formula suited to the Internet age, the paper’s effort, which is being spearheaded by Deputy Managing Editor Matt Mansfield, appears uniquely clear-eyed and transparent.
…At the core of the Mercury News campaign is a deceptively simple idea: Give the readers what they want.
Therefore, the Merc will conduct an enormous survey of its readership using three-person teams of staffers — folks from all departments — and an in-house blog where results of this research will be filed.
Mansfield and April Lynch posted Monday in the Merc blog:
Sure, we’ll include marketing data and all the piles of quantitative information on our paper and our industry. But we all know that stats never tell the whole story. To get it right, you need the complexities and character of human experience. People share insights that numbers never can.
We’ll be getting our current and potential audience to tell us what they need, want, and hope for from the news media in general and their leading local news organization in particular. We’ll start that process by just plain asking them about their lives, their habits, and their frustrations. We’ll also be listening for what they don’t say, along with what they do. We’ll also observe them — how they interact with our printed pages and Web site, how they find information in general, and how the media weave into the fabric of their days.
Think of this as going out on a story assignment or cold calling customers — but rolling that process back a notch. Rather than selling a specific product or researching a specific story, we’re simply looking for insights. Later on, we’ll work on turning those insights into ideas. Our only agenda is to discover what our agenda should be.
The effort will reportedly include concepts found in the Newspaper Next project — an effort by the American Press Institute and a consulting group, Innosight LLC — to create a new industry business model.
Find the Merc’s public “Rethinking” blog here:
http://www.mercurynewsphoto.com/rethink/
Read more about Newspaper Next here:
http://newspapernext.org/
Read Gustin’s story at Portfolio:
http://www.portfolio.com/views/blogs/daily-brief/2007/08/07/rethinking-the-mercury-news