Forgive me for indulging in a bit of Internet new media gee-whiz speculation and visionary deep-thoughts-hatching here.
Some months back, when we were making a food reporter from the Tribune
dance for us and answer our questions and explain why the world wasn't run exactly like we wish it was, I expressed a thought that was on my mind as I thought about how something like LTHForum works versus how the food section of a daily paper works, and who they're aimed at:
a slightly younger Mike G wrote:I know what the obvious answer back is-- "The food section isn't just for you obsessed food crazies, it's for everybody, and most people aren't as educated/insane as you."... But there comes a point when keeping things appealing to a mass audience by using celebrities, topics of lowest common appeal, etc. means you're creating a food section (or a sports section or an editorial page) for the people who aren't very interested in something rather than for the people who are very interested in it-- and that's crazy. That's chasing the people who don't especially want to be there and ignoring the ones who do.
This is all coming back to me because I ran across someone actually in the newspaper business
saying much the same thing-- in a way that also is reminiscent of our recent complaining about the dumbing down of the Food Network to reach a broader audience of people who want to be entertained by food shows, rather than actually use food shows to, imagine this,
cook something. The big media, TV and newspapers, all assume they have to chase the biggest possible audience. And indeed they do according to their existing economic model-- but their existing economic model was devised before someone could start something like LTHForum for peanuts by comparison and steal a real chunk of their audience.
No, I don't expect LTHForum to ever be even a fraction of the size of the Chicago Tribune's total readership, whenever someone says we're influential I only have to realize that the "LTHForum effect" is virtually invisible next to the "Check Please effect." But... if we're peeling off the best part, the most food-obsessed folks, and raising their expectations of what food discussion should be like, then that leaves a newspaper in the odd position of writing a generalist food section for people who care that much less about food. And if there's an LTH of sports and an LTH of business and an LTH of this that and every other thing, what's left for the generalist to cover and who are they covering it for? Can you really expect to survive by serving the people who don't care enough to read something right now at the expense of those who wouldn't miss it? As the guy from the Post puts it, "I think we've overlistened to people who never read the paper."
The real future even for general media in an age of specialization and online obsession is to cobble together a readership which is rabid enough about one thing that they have to buy the whole paper. For that reason, I think dumbing down is the worst choice you can make-- sure, there are more raw numbers there, but they don't care about what you're offering, so their loyalty to it, their willingness to read it for 50 years is skin deep. The obsessives are your hope for the future-- and if you're smart, you'll not only serve them with your food section, your sports section, your whatever section, but you'll think up ways to make more of them, the way a site like this does.