fix journalism a conversation about journalism’s future

Author: Michael Higdon | 09.11.2009

It irks me that our industry is currently having a debate about who the customer is; readers or advertisers.

The above Harvard Business blog talks about finding out how people read, something I’ve been whining about for a year now. A very anthropological, anti-focus group approach is what he suggests. I’d agree. Annie points out that that’s called good reporting and it should be a non-issue for journalists.

Unfortunately it is, and we’re not the only ones.

Alan Jacobson would tell you our most important customer is advertisers. He doesn’t link reader satisfaction with advertiser satisfaction. A unfortunate thought path, especially considering advertisers are also readers and they likely care about the credibility of the newspaper to give backing to their ads.

In an effort to work with our marketing director on reader surveys to find out how to better serve both our customers, I’ve listened to The Ultimate Question by Fred Reichheld. The book requires you drink a certain amount of Kool-Aid on the actual ultimate customer service survey question: “Would you recommend this product to a friend or colleague” with a multiple choice answer from 1, no to 5, don’t know, to 10, yes.

Reichheld talks mostly about companies that offer a product or service then have customer service departments. Grocery stores, insurance companies, banks, etc. When you have a problem with your insurance, you call the customer service department and they deal with it. The ultimate question helps companies gauge how their product is doing.

That’s an extreme oversimplification of the book, but you get the gist.

So considering news companies, our product IS customer service. Yes, it’s a tangible “product” but that newspaper or website in all its completeness is really a customer service. The newsroom is really a customer service department.

Do we do a good job of that? You can probably answer that question for your own company or property. Consider the motto of most news companies “to serve the community” or something like that. Do we really serve the community with our core products? We might have great circulation people that handle customer complaints but I don’t think our core product, which is really a service on paper/screen could accrue a high score with The Ultimate Question.

Something I’ve been thinking about lately anyway. I think it’s one way to look at news. If you want to fit news into the context of other industries in order to pull ideas from them, I think it helps to consider news a customer service not a product with customer service.