Required Reading: Digital Diet Experiment Finds Old Media Wanting
What We’re Seeing: You know the question. What if newspapers went away completely one day? As a good impatient journalist, probably tired of hearing newsroom people grousing about the decline of the industry and how "no one reads anymore," Amy Webb did a smart thing. She stopped reading newspapers, as well as listening to radio news and watching TV news.
Her methodology: "I conducted a Great Experiment: I went on a strict digital diet, spending 30 days without any form of traditional media. I wanted to know which was more important – the medium (television, newspaper, magazine, radio) or the information itself. I kept a daily journal of my successes, irritations and failures." Of course, she notes, much of the news and information she consumed originated from traditional sources – it was the means of consumption that she changed.
Webb is an experienced mainstream journalist, having worked for Newsweek and the Asian Wall Street Journal. Now she is the editor and founder of Dragonfire, a Philadelphia-based digital and multimedia-oriented magazine.
She puts her experience simply: "I was forced to look at a variety of sources … I’ve realized that I don’t need traditional, mainstream media. I’m getting the same information available to everyone else – getting more of it faster and more comprehensively." Yes, the 14+ hours she put in online made her tired – eyes, as well as undoubtedly other parts of the anatomy. And, yes, she missed print, the feel of it, the easy usability of it in bed on Sunday mornings. But she was able to get to the BBC, the Greensboro News and Record, and much more content that would have been hard for her to access through traditional print sources. And she was able to easily keep track of most of it through her Bloglines RSS reader.
She found that local coverage lacked depth online … from newspapers. She says she was forced to turn to blogs and podcasts and found she "was better informed" than she had been before.
Her experience is worth reading – and sharing internally. She wrote an op-ed on her experience for the Philadelphia Inquirer, and she was interviewed on NPR’s "Talk of the Nation" as well. Both, of course, are accessible on the Web.
In Outsell’s Opinion: Amy Webb’s experiment is fun, but her point is dead serious. Print is a transitional medium, and those of us deeply used to it can benefit from a walk on the other side. Publishers and information providers: it’s better to ask your staffs to engage in a similar experiment than to have 10 more meetings talking about the decline of print. The personal becomes the professional, and tricks like this can link the two. The experience of Web access is bound to influence old print minds, and that’s the beginning of change.