(Steve Duke)

Today I was asked what the biggest surprises are for me at the seminars I lead about improving online readership. There are two.

First, how little most people at newspaper online sites know about their online audience. Second, what a low opinion they think readers have of their sites.

At every seminar we ask participants who their online audience is and what audience they are targeting. With a roomful of online editors, marketing directors, online ad sales representatives, we would hope to get at least a broad answer. Remarkably, what we mostly get are blank stares.

At the most recent seminar, one participant said, "We pay lots of attention to stats: what people look at and when they visit the site," but they don't know anything about who is visiting.

The difficulty this causes is obvious: If you don't know who is visiting your site, or who you would like to visit your site, how do you decide what might be valuable content for your readers? How do you decide what experiences to concentrate on?

At some operations this basic market research just isn't being done. More often the research has been done, but it hasn't been shared widely within the organization. One participant at the most recent seminar said, "I only know because I asked the head of our Web operation before I came to this seminar." So here's a fellow who has enough Web responsibility that his paper sent him to the seminar, but he had to hunt an answer to this most basic question.

The first thing most newspaper companies need to do is find out who is visiting their sites and who is not. From that they can create an online strategy to reach targeted audiences.

The second surprise is that most people with some responsibility for their newspaper's Web site think it sucks. Or at least they think their readers think it sucks.

We ask participants to look at this image we adapted from Belden and tell us which words their readers would apply to their Web sites.



Uniformly, they pick negative words: irritate, annoy, aggravate, piss off, pester, puzzle and other negative words not on the image. Rarely does anyone say fascinate, astound, laugh, jolt, excite, amaze, humorous, encourage, astonish or any of the other positive attributes.

Why? Our seminarians say their sites are hard to navigate, predictable, too much like the print product. Sometimes they blame it on inadequate technical skills: "We tried to take print journalists and make them tech journalists when they didn't have the skills."

But one participant last week observed that "maybe it's less a tech issue than a mission issue," deftly linking the "we suck" perception with the lack of a real audience strategy.

We think he's right. It is less a tech issue and more an issue of not having a clear mission -- a strategy -- for how the Web site fits in with the print product to reach audiences and what audiences to target. Until newspapers can articulate a strategy, their Web sites will struggle.


By Steve Duke (s-duke@northwestern.edu)
Steve Duke is managing director for training at the Media Management Center and Readership Institute, and lecturer at Medill.