Newspapers and where they run business stories

Allen Wastler, managing editor of CNBC.com, writes Wednesday that some newspapers don’t have a good idea of when to play up or play down important business stories.

Wastler writes, “Today there are a couple of great examples. One of my major dead tree competitors is leading its front page with a story pegged to yesterday’s consumer confidence numbers. Our readers were initially interested in that Tuesday but quickly moved on to other subjects (I’m compulsive about watching our traffic monitoring doodads). Knowing that, I’m not sure I would have used it as a lead today. Of course, they needed to set up today’s Fed decision and the confidence numbers do that well. So their front page looks current, even if no one reads it.

“Another major newspaper — actually, the best paper out there and one of our partners — has a great story about Citigroup reconsidering its pledge to lay off those horrible credit card gimmicks of hiking rates for any reason whatsoever … like being late on an unrelated bill. I know people are going to be interested in that one. But my compadres didn’t give it much visibility at all; buried it deep in the business section, in fact. I’m pretty sure that story is going to do fairly well. It’s already a mild pink on my traffic heat map.

“Of course, each of these papers has its own Web site. But they don’t seem to use them as a weather vane for what people are going to read. In fact, the idea of using metrics to gauge audience interest and guide editorial decision making doesn’t seem to occur to them at all. I asked a colleague at our partner about it once and the whole idea seemed to put him off. Some of that may come from an entrenched journalistic attitude of superiority, which I’ve talked about before. Or it may just not occur to them.”

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