Call me a Luddite, call me behind the times, call me out of step with consumers (although I too am one), but like many folks of a certain age it’s becoming more difficult for me when the familiar becomes unfamiliar. That was my feeling this morning when I went out and collected my newspapers, The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post. I thought I had gotten two Journals; the latter paper has been given a facelift and was hardly recognizable. In fact, the editors so anticipated shock of its print readers (let’s face it, we’re mostly old enough to be a heart attack away from being ex-readers) that they put a Special Section in today’s paper titled “Redesign Owner’s Manual.”

Knowing my newspaper needs an owner’s manual made me die a little inside.

First of all, I’m still in a state of depression about the WSJ abandoning its broadsheet format a couple of years ago. Yes, it’s easier to read on a train now, but it seems to me that banner headlines no longer have the same impact, and I still have this sneaking suspicion that there’s news that’s been left out. (Of course, that’s true for all reporters now that their newsrooms have been shrunk.)

But at least the Journal was trying to cut down on printing costs and arguably was making the paper easier to handle. Why did the Post have to mess with a good, and familiar, thing?

It’s the webification of papers. They admit that they’re trying to keep pace with change, overhauling the paper the way they overhaul the web site. But a paper audience is not a web audience, and any consultant who told the Post the paper needed a facelift to stay “fresh” and “current” has never read a newspaper in print.

Okay, so they’ve got some new features, columns, etc. They’ve been doing that for years now. But they changed the typeface, to one that looks shockingly like the Journal, and they’ve gone the (completely unnecessary) route of adding the images of many of their writers, again looking very much like the ink drawings so iconic in the Journal. (Except theirs are made up of little dots, evocative of what my dot-matrix printer would render back in the 1980s with MacPaint.)

I can assure you I’m not the only Post reader whose life has been unpleasantly disrupted by this. Get your hands on a copy of the paper this coming Saturday, and I guarantee you the “Free for All” page will be filled with nasty letters, and the Ombudsman will be defending the paper from the onslaught of mail he received.

There is a point to this post other than me taking the opportunity of this forum to rant. It is this. The editors of the Post have embraced the digital future with an award-winning web site. But when they show up at those techie award ceremonies and pocket the trophies, they need to remember that they have many audiences, not just the bleeding-edge digirati.

It’s easy to spend a few minutes online, reading all the bloggers ranting about media companies needing to adopt new business models (as if they’ve somehow missed the memo), and think consumer demand has shifted completely to this 2.0 or 2.01 world. But consumers really do vary, and for some, the old way is still the best.

Many people haven’t converted to Blu-Ray; some are in fact still using VCRs, and I actually know people who have no TV recording device in their home. A majority of households still don’t have DVRs, although I think most DVR users, if they polled their social circle, would be hard-pressed to find one person who doesn’t. A majority of consumers of music still purchase CDs, at least some of the time.

New technologies and services will always arrive, but for consumers happy with the status quo, the cost of shifting can outweigh the benefits of the new technology or service. Thus, media providers need to keep existing customers happy even as they try to satisfy the needs of new ones.

And here’s the key: In meeting the needs of new customers, they must minimize the extent to which those new services don’t undermine the ability to continue to provide existing services to existing customers who are happy with what they have.

That is a concept that should be simple to any business owner — don’t sacrifice existing customers in the quest for new ones — but seems lost on the cutting-edge types who have no patience for old models and who seem to be disdainful of any service provider who does have such patience.

You know the type, they’re the ones who abandon the latest thing the moment it starts becoming mainstream, the ones who borrow from Yogi Berra and say things like “No one uses Facebook anymore, it’s too popular.”

It’s easy for providers of media to read these blogs and hear these folks on panels and think they speak for a broad swath of consumers, but they are no more representative of “consumers” at large than Glenn Beck is representative of all Republicans or Keith Olbermann is representative of all Democrats.

Any consumer has the right to bitch if he or she isn’t getting what they want, when they want it. I would ask that they recognize these three things: (1) They do not have an inalienable right to such instantaneous gratification. (2) Not every consumer shares their desire or need (yet). (3) Media providers, or any provider of goods and services, must strive to keep existing customers happy, knowing that the new business models aren’t always immediately congruous with old models.

I would also ask that the Post, which in the last few months has eliminated the Business and Book World sections and repurposed much of the rest of the newspaper, give me a few months to breathe before you shake things up again.

Unless you want to get opinion writer Dana Milbank off of Page 2, where his slant on news events often appears before coverage of the actual event deeper in the paper. But that would be a case of improving journalism; do that as often and as freely as you like.

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This entry was posted on Monday, October 19th, 2009 at 3:12 pm by Patrick Ross and is filed under blogging, culture, internet, web 2.0. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.