The innovators’ secret? Thinking of journalism as a service, not an art form

Mathew Ingram of GigaOM could have included Bleacher Report as an example in this recent piece about how successful digital media outlets like Gawker, Buzzfeed and Quartz think about news as a service, rather than as something they create and then distribute to a waiting audience.

With or without B/R, the piece is excellent, and worth reading. Ingram writes:

Many media companies and publishers do occasional customer surveys or focus groups. But these tend to be primarily marketing exercises, and ultimately just reinforce existing design and content decisions that have already been made by editors. For the most part, such organizations see their job as coming up with great ideas and producing great content—a process that usually takes place with zero input from readers—and then delivering that content on a variety of platforms. In effect, a one-way relationship …

Thinking about news or journalism as a service or product, however—especially a digital one—changes the way you think about your job. [In that case], you are thinking about how to understand what it is that readers want from you, and how to provide it to them in the best way possible.

In order to do that properly, you have to experiment, and iterate rapidly, and most of all use data to watch what your users (or readers, or customers, whatever you choose to call them) are doing with your product.

I tell this story a lot, and in fact just told it this week to a UC-Berkeley School of Journalism class that was visiting Bleacher Report’s office: When I came to B/R after more than two decades in the business, the biggest difference for me between Bleacher Report and every other media outlet I knew about was that B/R acted like, and thought of itself, as a product company.

I, and everyone I ever worked with, had always thought about journalism as an art form, though none of us ever would have described it that way. But we acted like it. As Ingram describes it:

Journalists often seem to believe that their job is to tell the reader what they think is important or relevant, rather than thinking of journalism as a service that they are providing, one in which the reader’s needs or desires are paramount, rather than the journalistic instincts of the author.

He also describes Snow Fall, the New York Times’ famous innovative multimedia project released in 2012, as “a great piece of content that the NYT dreamed up and then pushed out the door.” That’s pretty much how artists do it, right? You dream up the work, create it, release it, and then try to market it as best you can, or better yet let the marketing people market it.

That’s not how content works anymore. Ask B/R bigwigs what business Bleacher Report is in and they’ll say something like: Providing the best experience for sports fans around the teams and topics they’re interested in. That sounds like journalism as a product or a service.

I’m not one of those bigwigs, in case you’re wondering. But that’s how I answer too.