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March 28, 2024

Call In the Ethnographers

Important Details: Daily newspapers used to have it easy. Just serve the biggest mass market in any region, sell lots of advertising and produce the daily miracle. Now as that miracle turns to heartbreak — with staffs being slashed daily (900 in the recent month in the US alone), news companies are learning the value of “audience” and beginning to understand the differing requirements of differing audiences.

How are they doing it? Well, as many product decisions are driven by editors and marketers, publishers are increasingly turning to social anthropologists — ethnographers — to help them divine new news and information habits enabled by the internet. Yes, it’s a bit like Margaret Mead discerning the strange rituals of Pacific Islanders back in the 1920s, but news companies say it’s a vital piece of the new product puzzle.

Both the AP and Gannett are among those reaching into academe to figure out what’s going on.

“We’re doing more ethnographic research,” says Jennifer Carroll, vice president/new media content for Gannett, the largest newspaper company in the US and globally. Carroll says that the chain’s group of 60 “moms” sites targeted to young mothers owe their form to such research. Gannett tested the sites first in Indianapolis and Cincinnati, and talked with its target population. “Don’t do this until you spend a lot of time with the group you want to reach,” Carroll told Outsell.

Such engagement was key — especially for a news company used to offering “articles” as the solution for every reader need. In fact, moms told Gannett researchers that they wanted “help managing our lives” and a place to discuss their lives. Thus, the sites were formed around discussion and calendaring, with story content available but taking a backseat.

Recently, at the World Association of Newspapers conference in Goteborg, Sweden, the Associated Press released the results of its work with ethnographers as well.

AP engaged the Baltimore-based Context-Based Research Group, an ethnographic research firm with a global network of cultural anthropologists, to look at the news consumption patterns of young adults between the ages of 18 and 34 in Britain, India and the United States.

Among the major findings:

  • Young subjects of the study experienced news fatigue, meaning they were overloaded with facts and updates and had trouble connecting to more in-depth stories.
  • Participants yearned for quality and in-depth reporting, but had difficulty immediately accessing such content. This experience was common across participants’ race, gender and geographic location.
  • The news habits of the young consumers were dramatically different from those of previous generations.

“We had modest expectations about this type of research prior to embarking on this journey,” said Jim Kennedy, director of strategic planning for AP. Kennedy says the work helped produce a new model for creating products, which AP is now ramping up in such areas as health, entertainment and business.

For ethnographers, similar to journalists in some ways, it’s about looking at what people do, rather than what they say. “As anthropologists we immerse ourselves in a culture and are able to see what people do versus what they say they do,” said Dr. Robbie Blinkoff, co-founder and principal anthropologist at Context-Based Research Group.

Implications: It’s easy to poke fun at newspapers calling in social scientist to figure out new readers. Outsell believes though the focus on audience, however achieved, is what’s key. As the mass market further splinters, the news business is increasingly about understanding — and then serving targeted products to — niche audiences. That’s what readers of all kinds want. Not surprising, it’s what advertisers want as well. Of course, that’s the meeting place — reader-pleasing, advertiser-satisfying products — that will be the salvation of publishers going forward. Who are publishers gonna call? In some cases, it’s the ethnographers.