You can't sell news to people who won't borrow Dickens

Some thoughts on media (and specifically newspaper) consumption arising from my recent reading of The Logic of Life, which I review here. One theory explored in the book is that the decisions we make are the outcome of an internal wrangle between two parts of our brains - one, the dopamine system, concerned with immediate gratification, the other, the cognitive system, concerned with long-term planning (it should be obvious that I am wildly oversimplifying for convenience - the argument appears properly laid out on pp56-62 of the UK edition, which I recommend.)

The theory has been tested extensively - for example, "in one, the experimenters offered the subjects a snack: fruit or chocolate. Seven out of ten subjects asked for chocolate. But when the experimenters offered other subjects a different choice, the answer was different too: 'I'll bring you a snack next week. What would you like then, fruit or chocolate?' Three-quarters of subjects chose fruit." Other tests have shown that people choosing what to do now will tend to opt for gratification, but choosing what to do later will make a more considered choice. By this argument, if you choose which movie to watch right now you'll be laughing along to A Weekend at Bernie's in short order; choose which movie to watch next Thursday and you'll go for The Seventh Seal.

George Orwell understood this as far back as 1936: working for part of his life in a bookshop, he wrote that

"In a lending library you see people’s real tastes, not their pretended ones, and one thing that strikes you is how completely the ‘classical’ English novelists have dropped out of favour. It is simply useless to put Dickens, Thackeray, Jane Austen, Trollope, etc. into the ordinary lending library; nobody takes them out. At the mere sight of a nineteenth-century novel people say, ‘Oh, but that’s old!’ and shy away immediately. Yet it is always fairly easy to sell Dickens, just as it is always easy to sell Shakespeare. Dickens is one of those authors whom people are ‘always meaning to’ read..."

Apply for a moment this understanding of decision-making to newspapers and we arrive at a not-very-comforting conclusion. A newspaper is a package of information, the celebrity gossip and TV listings bundled in with the op-ed and the current affairs. Choose the bundle of news in a newspaper and you satisfy both parts of your decision-making brain. The dopamine system gets the immediate gratification of reading about the fabricated erotic misadventures of some soap actress or the Spurs result; the cognitive system gets the glow of knowing there's real, hard, investigative news in there somewhere too (don't worry, you don't ever have to actually read it to get the effect).

Online, the news package is unbundled (we already know this) and hard news outside the bundle is hard to monetise (we already know this too). But the effect on reading habits of unbundling hard news from the newspaper package seems likely, from this understanding of how decisions are made, to have a disastrous impact on the propensity to read that news (this might be new). Online, news consumption is all about immediate gratification: you choose the story you want to read now every single time. (Unless you're using del.icio.us or Instapaper: perhaps there lies the salvation of hard journalism.) Which perhaps takes us to the conclusion that not only is hard news outside the bundle hard to monetise, but that it's unlikely to be read either - a conclusion that's hardly inconsistent with what we already know about what news people really read online.

Comments

[Adam]

I fail to see the value of "hard", investigative journalism. Its history is colored largely by demagoguery.

Also, while the Web itself may be unbundled, that does not mean that it is consumed in an unbundled form. People create their own bundles; be it through simple bookmarking, tagging, or feed aggregators. This allows them to choose the specific content producers they put into the bundle; so you can have your webcomics and your blogs about the economics of media all in one place.

[Daniel Hall]

Adam makes a great point about consumers creating their own bundles. I'd add that this means that I can use technology to make the "week-ahead fruit" choice every time (unlike in traditional media, where I am forced to take delivery of the gossip pages along with my news). The question then may not be whether hard news will disappear, but rather whether its consumers will accept advertising in their bundles (RSS readers, etc.), as ads are how news is funded.