§ Subscribe

Alternatives

Enter your email address to receive blog updates by email:

Delivered by FeedBurner

§ Podcast

• For Immediate Release
  A weekly podcast for professional communicators from Shel Holtz, ABC and Neville Hobson, ABC.
  Podcast Feed
  Vote for FIR

---

§ PR Search

---

§ Places

• Shel's link blog
• Blogs I read
• Holtz Communication + Technology
• IABC
• Ragan Communications
• Society for New Communications Research

---

§ Dead Trees

• Tactical Transparency
  
  by Shel Holtz and John C. Havens
  
  
  
  
• How to Do Everything with Podcasting
  
  by Shel Holtz with Neville Hobson
  
  
  
  
• Blogging for Business
  
  by Shel Holtz and Ted Demopoulos
  
  
  
  
• Corporate Conversations
  
  by Shel Holtz
  
  
  
  
• Public Relations on the Net
  
  by Shel Holtz
  
  
  
  

---

§ License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.

Thursday, June 18, 2009

Serendipity: A strength of print

I was thumbing through my Sunday newspaper earlier this week when I came upon a full-page feature that, despite the dullness of the topic and my own lack of interest in government finance, drew me in. “State Budget 101” featured a cartoon professor walking you through a plain-English explanation of the key issues underlying California’s budget crisis with simple-to-understand charts and graphs. Here’s what it looked like:

It struck me, as I dug into the feature, that this is the kind of thing that newspapers should be doing. Enough innovative, useful material like this could entice a lot of people back to reading the daily dead-tree version of the news.

The same information can, of course, be found online. In fact, this same feature is available on the Web in an interactive format:

But here’s the main difference between a print newspaper and an online feature:

My eyes would skip right past it as my brain subconsciously noted that it has something to do with budgets and finance, not my strong suit nor a focus of interest. But when I turned the page and saw the feature there, all in one place with its appealing graphics and a promise of simplifying something complex, I paid attention.

That’s serendipitous discovery of content.

As I noted a few weeks back, rather than introducing more and more compelling content like this, most newspapers have grown timid. Turning a page means finding more AP and Reuters coverage of stories you’ve already read on some news site because you learned about it on Twitter. With that kind of content, it’s no wonder people are abandoning newspapers.

But turning a page and seeing something you didn’t expect, something you never would have looked for, but that makes you go “wow,” that’s a capability that newspaper publishers need to exploit. And as long as I continue to find content like that in the Bay Area News Group’s newspapers, I’ll keep subscribing. (Incidentally, this is also a strength to be leveraged in internal communications, helping to simplify complex issues for employees that they would never click to view on the intranet.)

One suggestion, though. While the interactive, online version of the feature included a PDF of the print version, there was no link to the interactive page in the newspaper. Tighter integration between print and online will only bolster print’s value.