Where business editors, and newspapers, are failing

What follows is an anonymous submission to Talking Biz News. The writer is a well-known person in business journalism and has been a reporter, columnist and editor of a daily newspaper business section, and someone I have known for the past five years. The writer wishes to remain anonymous at this time due to his current job, but wants to foster discussion in business journalism.

I have edited the writing to eliminate anything that would identify the person.

It is increasingly clear that newspapers don’t “get it” about the future of journalism. That’s an old story, but what worries me the most is that they seem to be missing the solution.

The future of the newspaper is to be the one-stop shop for the local reader. That means being the paper equivalent of your “favorites” button on your computer, or being the print equal to any news-crawler service that goes out, finds what interests you and brings it back on one Web site every day.

Doing that means doing two things: 1) Being intensely local. You’re the only one providing local news, so it’s where you have the advantage. 2) Filling the rest of your section with the “best of breed” for whatever you do. If you use a wire story to discuss daily market activity, it needs to be the best thing out there on the subject (not necessarily the most readily available wire piece).

Want to tell your readers about how to better use their computer? Find the best computer columnist you can. Mutual funds or personal finance? Find the people you think are best. Covering the next big business scandal? Find the best coverage of it — and not the most expedient, or the first version to cross your desk — and use it, even if it means getting that coverage from Web sites, other newspapers, whatever.

Unfortunately, newspapers focus on doing it on the cheap — so they drop columns to save a few bucks, but they wind up using flaccid prose from the wire services — or in appealing to certain demographics (so that they buy a writer who appeals to a specific readership or who fits a certain profile, rather than the ones who write the best stuff). They’re thinking in conventional ways — using mostly traditional newspaper copy — while they live in unconventional times.

In short, newspapers have to be better gatekeepers. That’s not just in business. If you are running Iraq coverage, it still needs to be best in breed. And they need to think of every bit of filler, of every column, of every brief and every story as an opportunity to make themselves a must-read, a place their customers go to because they value the editors’ judgment in making something vital.

If you run a lousy computer column, someone will go online to find a good one. If you run a crappy personal finance column, readers will go online to find a good one, especially literate and computer-savvy business readers.

By doing so, many business readers have made their local business section mostly obsolete. That’s not to say that the Web is great and print stinks; it’s that, for example, MarketWatch’s base coverage is, roughly, the online equivalent of the AP. And if the newspaper is using the wire feed to fill its space, the average reader can do as well or better online, needs only to skim the local business stories and then moves on to the things THEY found online that cover the subjects better.

It comes down to this: As a business editor, I remember being excited whenever I changed columnists or brought something new to the paper. The reason I was excited is that I was always trying to create an upgrade, give readers the best columnist on any subject we felt they should see a column about. I dropped some popular, entrenched names (Louis Rukeyser, most notably) when I took over, in favor of folks who did the job better. And the readership studies for the paper showed that business section readership improved. I have to believe the changes were one reason why.

Again, if you are changing your section and you are NOT excited about how the alterations you are making are improving what you put out to the public, you have a problem.

Enough on this rant. I just think that if you polled business editors today and said, “Do you believe that you have the best … [fill-in-the-blank item that would appear in a newspaper] or that you could provide better coverage if you could use more content from the Web, buy more syndicated material,â€? etc., you’d find that business editors are running sections that they do NOT believe truly present the best mix of local/national stuff every day.

And if you can’t present that best-in-breed mix, why exactly do you think you deserve to survive?