Back in the glory days of the daily newspaper getting a scoop meant beating the competition by half-a-day or possibly by a full day. With newspaper boys screaming, “Extra!” on every corner, a good scoop meant thousands of additional newspaper sales. Thus, being first with a story had a huge bottom-line impact.
Back in the glory days of TV news getting an exclusive usually meant an entire day’s advantage over the competition; what with just the one daily evening newscast. If teased appropriately a good scoop would add viewership to that evening’s newscast but mostly it was a prestige moment that helped build the network’s news brand. So, a good scoop (or more rightly consistently being able to get scoops and exclusives) had a positive business impact, but much less immediate and tangible than newspaper scoops.
But what is a scoop/exclusive worth in the Internet age? At best a media outlet will have the story to itself for a few hours before it is cited, cross-linked, and tweeted all over the world by other outlets. Granted, an exclusive will drive some traffic to the website and might, might, MIGHT drive some advertising click-throughs. But people who are looking for a quick read on breaking news are highly unlikely to take the time for a diversion into web advertising.
No, the only real business driver for working a scoop in 2010 has to be for the prestige of it. It is purely a brand-building exercise.
If that is the case then the aim should be to get the story right AND first, or to be in-depth AND first. And if being first is not possible (say for an afternoon newspaper with a 9 a.m. deadline) then it seems the business case would say that being right and/or in-depth would trump the now very ephemeral advantages of being first.
Being first with a bullshit story is probably worse than not covering it at all. It ruins the news brand. Unless your “brand” is focused on whipping up a particular market segment and reinforcing their existing belief structures. Then it’s fine. But it’s not really news, its commentary and opinion
It seems to me that the business aim for entities in the actual news business — especially for web-only outlets — should be quality and depth of reporting that will create stickyness and build the brand. Stickyness is web-speak for having viewers stay on your site for more than a few minutes and view more than just the one page that you might have entered by via an external link. Better yet, to be compelling enough to entice people to come back and be regular readers or god-forbid, actual subscribers to an actual newspaper.
I guess none of this is really earth shattering. Unless you run the Clinton Herald, our local newspaper. In which case your local beat is consistently scooped by the Gannett outlet, The Quad City Times forty miles downriver. The Times also does a better job of driving traffic to the website with a full twitter stream of breaking news (the Herald tweets maybe once a day) but more importantly the Times has all of its news archived on the web site unlike the Herald which still seems to think that if it’s not ink on paper delivered to the door then it doesn’t count.
The Herald consistently embargoes content on the website to drive people to the paper edition. If I miss a local story in the dead-tree edition and it doesn’t make the cut to the web page three or four days after publication? I have to physically go to the friggin Library. Which I’ve done. Once.
What I’m getting at is that it just doesn’t make a lot of sense that if you have a near-monopoly on the local newspaper business and are, in the claims of the publisher, “consistently one of the most profitable papers in the company,” to be consistently lagging your competition from down-river. Gannett, like all major publishers has a huge debt-load (unlike the privately-held CNHI, the Herald’s parent) and is always cutting budgets to the bone. Considering the minor marginal costs of placing additional, non-print content to the website and driving traffic and adding value with Twitter feeds, it would seem like a no-brainer.
