Tips for Changing Newsrooms and reader demand

Paul Bradshaw at the Online Journalism Blog has some tips for changing newsrooms:

1. Set up your systems so that journalists get emails when someone comments on their stories. Nothing kills a conversation like someone who doesn’t listen.

2. Make an effort to meet social media users in your community/beat in person at least once a month (it helps if you set up a meeting or join one that exists). Failing that, have a video conversation. Both strengthen community more than just text. Jo Geary does this brilliantly in Birmingham.

3. Make 30 minutes every week to think about how you do your job, identify problems or frustrations, and blog about it, inviting suggestions on how you can do it better, or asking if others can help.

4. Try a new toy every fortnight - online services like Seesmic, Twitter, blogging, Ning, social bookmarking, Dipity, Yahoo Pipes, Shozu; hardware like the Zoom H2, Flip camcorder, and N95. IF you don’t have any ideas check out TechCrunch.

5. Regularly distribute information internally to all reporters and editors about what is happening on the website - popular stories, most commented on, bookmarked, old stories getting new interest, most visited on mobile, what times most accessed, where traffic is coming from, what search terms are most popular, what stories are getting a ‘long tail’ of small but consistent traffic.

6.If the online side of things seems like ‘extra work’ find out ways to make it less onerous and more automatic - explore Firefox extensions, bookmarking buttons, shortcuts; using ‘downtime’ to update via text or mobile web; and how to syndicate an RSS feed from one place to another (e.g. Twitter’s feed or Delicious feed to your blog).

Most of this seems like good advice to me. Newsrooms can't see the web as simply another platform on which to publish the same material from their traditional medium, but have to explore how they can be more interactive, make use of audio/video and enable the publication of user-generated content.

I think tip number five about keeping reporters updated on Internet traffic would be especially useful, as long as it doesn't lead to an over-emphasis on certain stories. This leads us to an interesting question: should websites be driven in their content and their focus on what stories and news items are most popular? After all, BBC News would have whole sub-sections on the Sudanese man and the goat (see Adam Curtis' blog post on it here) and the python's fight with the alligator in the Florida everglades if this were the case.

This is connected to the age-old adage of the paper and the readership - which responds to which - but online content allows us to keep trace of popular or unpopular stories via their Internet traffic. We can't easily tell which stories people read most avidly, and which topics they will return to issue after issue, in a newspaper. Online we can, and so their must be a temptation to obsessively analyse the most popular stories and change news values and focus accordingly.

I'd be tempted to say that news sites should avoid such a practice, as certain news items may still be of great importance and relevance, but read by fewer people. But who decides what is of 'great importance and relevance', if not the readers? Indeed, why should websites, like all media, not be driven by readership in some respects?