There’s an interesting buzz among the publishers of primarily newspaper and magazine print media: Print is dead. Yes, that’s a bit of a sensationalist exaggeration, but surprisingly, it isn’t far off from the truth of the situation with which the publishers must cope.
Indicator #1 – The Washington Post
For the past several years prior to 2004, circulation of the newspaper was holding reasonably steady at roughly 770,000 subscriptions per year. However, by June of 2004, the number of subscribers dropped by nearly 50,000, and today the paper is continuing to lose several thousand readers every month.
In September of 2004, the Post ran six focus groups with the objective to determine the cause of its loss of readership, identified to be in the economically important 18-34 year old demographic range. The results were startling, and they may be categorized as follows:
- There should be deeper coverage of the proffered subject matter
- The navigation was too confusing and should make more sense
- The idea of old newspapers piling up in a corner is extremely unappealing
The publishers of other dailies are noticing similar sentiments among their readers, and the decline in subscribers is so distressing that newspapers such as Newsday and the Chicago Sun-Times admitted to falsely inflating their readership numbers.
Indicator #2 – Examining the Media
At about the same time that the Post was running its focus groups, the Online Publishers Association conducted a Generational Media Study (http://www.online-publishers.org/pdf/opa_generational_study_sep04.pdf). This study of 18-54 year olds (subdivided into 18-24, 25-34, and 35-54 year age brackets) gives some insight into the results of the Post focus groups:
- 46.5% of all respondents rate the Internet as their top media choice category. Newspapers was rated the top media choice category for only 3.2% of the respondents.
- 73% of respondents rated the Internet as “an important part of my day” while 27% of respondents felt the same for newspapers (11% said so for magazines).
- The Internet is the only medium in which respondents perceived growth in usage—that is, users reported using the Internet more now than they did one year ago.
The Medium is the Message, with Apologies to Marshall McLuhan
In examining the results of the Post focus groups, it might be reasonable to conclude—incorrectly—that young people are becoming more and more disinterested in reading to acquire information. By considering the Post results in the context of the OPA study, a different picture emerges: one in which reading is a hypertextual activity connected with freely available information content presented in a digital rather than analog environment.
The “MTV Generation” we heard about several years ago characterized by short attention spans and a predilection for simultaneous multi-sensory inputs is the Internet generation of today, absorbing information in a gestalt of sights, sounds, and symbolic abstractions. It is not coincidental that the MTV Generation matches up so well with the 18-34 year old age group… and this same group makes up a majority of students in most higher education institutions.
The question of newspaper relevancy gives way to a more fundamental information management question in the higher education landscape. How might our institutions parse and package information so that, first, students will find it accessible and wish to access it, and, second, students will retain their connection to the information if not retaining actual possession of the information itself. Reviewing the Post focus group results should provide guidance.
Deeper subject matter coverage
In a 1945 article entitled “As We May Think” published in the Atlantic Dr. Vannevar Bush (Director of the Office of Scientific Research and Development during World War II) wrote of the “memex,” a fictional machine that would hold the sum total of all human knowledge.
Wholly new forms of encyclopedias will appear, ready-made with a mesh of associative trails running through them, ready to be dropped into the memex and there amplified. The lawyer has at his touch the associated opinions and decisions of his whole experience, and of the experience of friends and authorities. The patent attorney has on call the millions of issued patents, with familiar trails to every point of his client's interest. The physician, puzzled by its patient's reactions, strikes the trail established in studying an earlier similar case, and runs rapidly through analogous case histories, with side references to the classics for the pertinent anatomy and histology. The chemist, struggling with the synthesis of an organic compound, has all the chemical literature before him in his laboratory, with trails following the analogies of compounds, and side trails to their physical and chemical behavior
Dr. Bush was the first to describe hypermedia, and his memex concept could be considered the conceptual parent of the World Wide Web. His whole point in presenting memex and its operation was to describe what he considered to be a more natural methodology to search for and acquire information. The hypermedia relationship of information on the Web facilitates Bush’s methodology while providing deeper subject matter coverage than newspapers or other print media can offer.
Clearer navigational architecture
In the Post focus groups, the target demographic made repeated reference to the fact that the organizational structure for navigating through the newspaper made little sense. The idea of placing more important information “above the fold” or creating a “center of visual impact” are becoming increasingly less effective in directing the attentions of readers in the younger (18-34 year old) age bracket. Adding to user confusion in the digital world, Web designers sometimes mistakenly apply print navigational structures to Web pages.
As Web usability expert Jakob Nielsen observes, the Web is “different from television, it's different from printed newspapers, and it's different from glossy brochures, so you cannot create a good website out of content optimized for any of these older media.”
True information portability
The last point regarding the desire not to have accumulations of newspapers to deal with seems somewhat humorous, but it is important to consider the implications of information portability in designing effective Web presences. The value of data to the student-age end user is almost in direct proportion to the end user’s ability to “own” the data by transporting it from environment to environment regardless of the data type. MP3 and WMV audio files, Flash animations, text and PDF files, JPG picture files; all may be burned to CD or DVD and stored on easily accessible über-email systems, or copied to shirt-pocket jump drive devices. What is clear is that the user wishes to carry hundreds of megabytes of information personally, but the information must be stored in digital format to facilitate portability and convenience. Consider that users have access to information via the Web, WAP enabled cell phones, and handheld PDAs—how might we design across the board to meet a truly diverse end user population?
The bottom line is that our student population demographic is strongly similar to the demographic of the declining newspaper and magazine readers in both information needs and expectations regarding the presentation of that information. Building effective websites for this end user will likely require considerable rethinking of the communication metaphor. The administrators that plan and manage communications to student populations need to take notice: their intended audience is no more impressed with paper course catalogs and printed class schedules than they are with newspapers and magazines. These new-media savvy students are coming into institutions with some firm expectations of what they should be able to access electronically, and if we cannot meet these service expectations, they will search for satisfaction elsewhere—the irony being that their searches will take place from the comfort and familiarity of their own desktops.
It should come as no surprise that even though readers are abandoning paper newspapers and magazines in increasing numbers, these same readers are still obtaining the content of those publications online and in most cases at no cost. This easily-accessible free content model cannot be left to a hit-or-miss process of Web design in higher education that simply transfers the frustrations of the paper world to the online world. We must explore how the application of Information Architecture analysis techniques can help us create a Web map that end users will understand and appreciate if we are to anticipate the needs and desires of our web end users.
- Hap Aziz