Ken Doctor

Media Analyst, Nieman Journalism Lab

Ken Doctor is a media analyst whose Newsonomics column appears on the Nieman Journalism Lab website. Doctor previously was Vice President for Content Services for Knight Ridder Digital and Managing Editor of the Saint Paul (Minnesota) Pioneer Press.

Quotes

We don’t see much product experimentation or differentiation in the newspaper experience.

There’s very little difference in terms of editorial strategies. It’s kind of a one size fits all. ... You don’t see the kind of things that, for instance, The New York Times is doing with cooking or crosswords, they’re going to do it with parenting. They’re not recognizing niches. There’s a couple of sports verticals that have been tried; those were also tried 10 and 15 years ago. But very few, and part of it is a lack of imagination and part of it is simply there are not enough resources to test new products.

the secondary part of it is 66 percent of reading, of news reading, is mobile, yet the mobile news experience for most newspaper companies is pretty poor. It’s a pretty fatal combination when you don’t have the content and you don’t have the product delivery.

If you look at small dailies and large weeklies, they have done better than metros for the last 15 years. They have more sense of community connection. It’s less about digital. It’s about simply having the kind of content that people want and can’t get any other place.