Dec 07 2011
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“ 2. Serve the broad public, not just the affluent. In a keynote speech at the Media Giraffe Conference on the future of journalism in 2006 — as the Big March was stepping off — I laid out how newspapers, which produce the vast majority of original reporting, had narrowed their focus to the affluent because current advertisers want to reach only upscale spenders. Thus, they turned their backs on the less-than-affluent public who once had been their bread-and-butter readers. Given that one size does not fit all — more than half of U.S. households have no investments, for example, so newspapers’ personal finance columns rarely help them — the majority of Americans are now ill served by existing media. The situation has only gotten worse in the last five years, and almost all non-hyperlocal web journalism is aimed at elite niches. And AOL deliberately chooses only affluent communities for its hundreds of hyperlocal Patch sites.
