Last week, Columbia’s Journalism School took center stage in addressing a problem that has been troubling journalists and their readers for years—how can we continue to produce high-quality journalism when it has become increasingly difficult to make a profit from it?
In a new report from the J-school titled “The Reconstruction of American Journalism,” the Internet is portrayed as a promising new way to get the news out. But here’s what the report missed—the Internet is also a promising new way to bring in revenue.
This may sound surprising, seeing as the Internet has placed the media in a seemingly impossible situation—when the market demands all the latest stories online for free, how does the media pay the bills? At first glance, there’s no getting around this problem.
However, this is the same problem that Google faces everyday. Google gives away all its content for free. Yet Google does famously well when it comes to reaping revenue, while the news sources struggle.
What’s Google’s secret, then? Google employs targeted advertising that strives to use the power of the Internet to its fullest advantage. The Journalism School report states that current advertising models fail to support journalism in this day and age. However, the report is wrong to assume that advertising will never again be able to support journalism. What we need is a new advertising model.
While newspapers and other forms of print media are making a strong transition to the Internet in terms of finding new ways to deliver content to readers, looking at online advertising often feels like seeing the same ad over and over again on a subway station wall. Either that, or a newspaper takes exactly the same approach to online advertising as it does to print advertising—pitching its ads to its general reading audience. In order to see how ineffective this can be, let’s take an example: The readership of The New York Times is generally classy, so both online and in print, The New York Times tried (and failed) to sell me a new Jaguar today. I’m in college—I’ll stick to the subway.
The difference between targeted and non-targeted advertising is like the difference between finding the very item in the store that I had gone there to buy in the first place, and being shoved into a store full of items that are of zero interest to me. All advertisers are interested in seeing that the shoe fits as well as possible, and this is the single major consideration when deciding where to advertise. So far, most online media institutions have yet to convince advertisers that online advertising is a way to reach the specific readers they’re looking for.
A newspaper’s online advertising can and should be highly targeted. Online, I can indicate who I am and what I like by visiting sites that are of interest to me. If I’m reading an article about College Music Journal, the ads on the side of the page shouldn’t be trying to sell me a Jaguar—the ads should try to sell me the latest albums from up-and-coming music critics’ darlings. If I’m reading about the latest business mergers and acquisitions, maybe then you can try and sell me a new Jaguar.
When it comes to online advertising, many of us remember more bad, non-targeted experiences than good, well-targeted experiences. It’s hard not to get annoyed by a pop-up ad and a robotic female voice informing me that I’ve won a new iPod. At the same time, many of us experience effective, targeted online advertising on a daily basis every time we do a Google search. The technology exists for a company to support itself via targeted online advertising. It is time for media institutions to catch up and learn how to support themselves in a similar way.
This will take work. This is a problem not only for computer programmers, but also for anyone working in journalism, especially current and aspiring leaders. This is a crucial moment, and for high-quality journalism to come out on top, it is important that media institutions set up an infrastructure in which journalists, computer programmers, business people, and managers can collaborate and learn from one another. When minds come together, the Internet gives us the opportunity to invent and re-invent the way business is done. Through targeted online advertising, the Internet Age can become a profitable one for media institutions.
The author is a Columbia College junior majoring in economics.
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