Do we give people what they want or what they need? Pablo Boczkowski, professor at Northwestern University’s School of Communications has been researching the space in between and gave a talk at IU.
People want to read what is interesting, he says. There is Public Affairs news (global, politics, economy, etc) and crime, celebrity, weather and entertainment news. What he found was that competing outlets are delivering similar news and the demand does not always meet the supply of requests (by clicks). Public Affairs news is the spinach, the news we need. All the other stuff? It’s McDonald’s–it’s chicken nuggets.
“It’s not a phenomenon that people are not interested in public affairs news,” he said. The difference in the new space is the unbundled internet. Boczkowski described the web as an unbundled place for niche markets.
The question for me, here, is how people will find and discover sources they can trust. How will niche news outlets float to the top, become available and even have the funding to do investigative, well edited, well reported, relevan news? And, even if all this quality news exists, will the Perez Hilton reading, Facebook Stalking readers find it? What will it take to move people out of their drive thrus and into the produce aisle?
Before, people came into news sites from the front page and clicked from there. But ask social media sharing increases, hits are populated throughout site significantly more frequently.
Will people eventually get sick from eating all the McDonalds and change their behavior? It’s hard to say. Is there a way to make Broccoli taste more like chicken nuggets?
What makes entertainment news so appealing? It’s certainly not more relevant to our lives than midterm elections but it’s tasty. It’s shocking, sensational, easy to understand and easy to throw away and worth talking about at the water cooler. I’m also interested to know if sharing has helped drive more visitors to sites. If so, does that eventually translate to more subscribed or frequent visitors.