Know Your Customer

By Andre Jackson

Hello. Thanks for stopping by and reading this, my debut column on BusinessJournalism.org. A J-school professor in my past enthusiastically supported the use of anecdotal tops to draw in readers, so here goes. I’ll try to not bury the lead.

I often rode commuter trains between Chicago’s downtown Loop and the northern suburbs while a graduate student in the mid-‘90s. The morning and evening runs were packed with C-level types – affluent professionals who made the business world go ‘round.

In deference, perhaps, to their status, the trains almost never ran late. At least not until a railroad merger resulted in new personnel running the operation. After that, the timetable became much less of a sure thing as the new managers gave short shrift to keeping the bankers’ specials on schedule.

What happened next was predictable. Outraged riders howled in the right places, and the newly-imported railroad cowboys were taken aback by the furious storm raised by trainloads of key influencers.

Before long, a hastily printed letter of apology was posted for all to see. And the trains were back to running on time.

The experience drove home a couple of key learnings from my classes at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management. From a business standpoint, the rail line’s new owners made two key mistakes – they didn’t know their customers and, worse, they took them for granted.

Commuter trains might not seem relevant to business journalism, but the theme is universal – successful enterprises, newsrooms in this case, should know their customers well if they are to serve them well.  Doing so is key to surviving in today’s challenging times.

Newspaper journalism is under siege – slammed by what’s been called a perfect storm of declining circulation, falling advertising revenues and a sluggish economy that’s worsened a long-running slide.  Newspapers, particularly ones owned by market-sensitive public companies, have reacted as do firms that are beholden to Wall Street. They’ve repeatedly cut newsprint, staff and sections in a desperate attempt to lower costs and shore up income statements.

As readers and the advertisers that pursue them march inexorably into the Information Age’s supermarket of choices, the austerity moves that follow have been stark and drastic for newspaper business sections. First, the longtime staple of stock tables was put on a radical diet; four pages of dense agate became two, then one, even less at some papers. In hindsight, that was the easy part. Next came what would have been unthinkable a few years ago – the back-to-the-future banishment of business news to the back of sports, metro or other sections. These moves came not that many years after demand for information in a go-go economy led papers to expand business news into standalone sections.

The future will present even more challenges. So what can self-respecting business journalists do besides fret over industry bad-news blogs? I’ll offer suggestions in this and future columns.

For now, it can help our cause to learn from the railroaders’ miscalculations. We should move closer to our customers, and stay there. Doing so can help us make a better business case – as well as a journalistic one – for keeping news coverage focused and strong.

Strategically, it makes sense. We should strive to know more about business readers’ demographic details than the publisher, the marketing director or the advertising sales team.

This marketing cornerstone hopefully makes sense as a survival tool in this tumultuous age. It may come as a shock, though, to the remaining few Ivory Tower types in dark newsroom corners. Or perhaps buyouts already have claimed the last of the “we know what’s best for the reader” folks. We can only hope so.

But how do we laser in on reader desires in a time of dwindling resources? These days, there may be little or no money to pay for expensive reader surveys, focus groups and other research tools favored by marketers. That’s not a deal-killer. Guerrilla marketing of the kind practiced by penny-pinching entrepreneurs can yield valuable insights and pay dividends when it comes time for strategic planning or cross-departmental meetings.

The cheapest way to get in touch with readers is to be responsive to them in some fashion each workday. A few minutes spent between deadlines, during at-desk lunches or while waiting for the next meeting can get you in touch with readers and what’s on their minds. Return a couple phone calls, answer some emails. When you’re engaging with readers, use your reporting skills to question them about coverage and how it does – or doesn’t – matter to them. What elements in print or on the Web benefit them? Post a reader query online to seek input about specific features or new techniques you’re trying. Yes, we’re all working harder all the time, but even 10 or 15 minutes a day spent in this manner will make you smarter about your customers.

And, since we’re all business journalists here, go one step further and quantify the feedback. Keep files of notes and comments. Use spreadsheets or database programs to sort data. Good data processing will let you present persuasive numbers to help buttress your case for this or that. It helps, for example, to point out that 3,000 readers (what percent of your circulation is that?) complained the last time you cut stock tables. Of course, you also should take the next step and find out what percentage of the 3,000 canceled subscriptions. That’ll probably be your publisher’s first question.

Sitting at your desk engaging readers is one thing, the next level is to get out of the building and interact with the business community and reader groups. Invite engaged readers or businesspeople to lunch and ask what makes your journalism valuable to them? Speak to business groups about your newsroom and its strategy. Make yourself a regular at business networking sessions and keep your reporter’s radar on high alert for what MBA types call “consumer insights.”

And, don’t worry; thinking a bit more like a marketer won’t taint your journalism.  It will likely make it stronger, more competitive and better equipped to survive in today’s hyper-competitive multimedia market.

Other ways to engage readers:

1. Regularly include contact information for editors and reporters in taglines and/or contact boxes. Consider including phone numbers and not just email addresses. Many readers still lack email, or aren’t yet comfortable with anything other than a phone call.


2. Create a general email address for reader questions and comments that don’t quite fit a specific category. And monitor it as often as possible. Mention in the lead-in copy that individual replies might not be possible. That helps manage customer expectations.


3. When you’re going to lower a boom and make major changes (eliminating big chunks of content or folding a section into another, for example), set up a special telephone voicemail box and general email address to handle reader comments. That’ll give readers a place to express themselves, and it lets you reply in a way that works for you and your deadlines. Just be sure to regularly check voicemails so you don’t crash service to your entire building. It can happen, an IT guy once told me.

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Copyright © 2008 Donald W. Reynolds National Center for Business Journalism