Monday, October 8, 2012

Do we really want news on our fridge?

Here's an example of how sometimes "we can" doesn't have to mean "we should" or "we do."


This is the fridge in the graduate student lounge. It has the capability to get news, tweets and more once you connect it to the internet. Mercifully, nobody has taken the time to set it up.

On a slow day, I might spend 20 seconds at my fridge, but I'm looking at its contents, not its front. Is there really a crowd of people out there going, "Man, the front of my fridge is so boring. What it needs is a touch screen so I can read news on my fridge. That's right, a news fridge." (On the other hand, a fridge that plays music from Pandora is potentially useful because you don't have to stare at the tiny, elbow-height (on me) screen to enjoy it.)

When I was at my newspaper, I felt like new media initiatives were sometimes approached in this same way. Hey, could we have a live chat along with that news event? Even if it's not the sort of thing that people watch live and participate in? If the answer is "yes, we can," then the answer immediately became, "yes, we should." Flood the site with anything we can think of, and maybe something will work. Throw all the spaghetti against the wall, and see what sticks.

This was partly because it's the editorial department in charge of all our content. Any sort of marketing or audience research was directed at attracting advertisers, not readers. We were left on our own, and without time to conduct our own research, we were left to make guesses. And our guesses weren't that good. If we made those judgments based on what phone calls we got at the office, then everything would be about the TV listings and the Junior Miss Salem Rodeo Queen pageant.

All this to say, if we're going to try something new, perhaps existing newsrooms aren't the best incubator for it. If we leave it to the overworked journalists who are very married to their routines, we might get news fridges. It's new, it's news, but it's stupid.

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