《华盛顿邮报》不应盲目讨好年轻人

    “所有企业永远保持年轻，”杰夫•贝佐斯上周三对《华盛顿邮报》（The Washington Post）的员工说。“如果客户群跟你一起变老，你就会重蹈伍尔沃斯公司（Woolworth's）的覆辙。”

    一番简洁有力的陈述——甚至可以说巧舌如簧。这样说不完全错，但也不太准确，《华盛顿邮报》不应该以此作为一项指导原则。新闻组织一再显示，当它们尝试着追逐“年轻人群”时，它们往往遭遇惨败。与此同时，《华盛顿邮报》其实应该好好学习伍尔沃斯公司几十年来的成功和创新历程，同时当然也要避免这家零售商的最终命运。

    对于亚马逊公司（Amazon）创始人、《华盛顿邮报》新东家贝佐斯上周三的言论，邮报员工称赞有加，尽管这番话或许有些含糊其辞，略显老套。在目前这个节点上，一位报社老板真情流露出的任何乐观情绪势必都会受到员工们的热烈欢迎。贝佐斯似乎真的很乐观，尽管他还欠缺具体的规划。就目前而言，对于他来说，表达出他相信报纸业务可以被挽救这一信念就足矣。尽管他并没有透露任何与进一步投资《华盛顿邮报》相关的意向，但他至少表明他不打算进一步裁人。

    包括贝佐斯在内，没有人知道怎样做才有效。报纸业务的根本问题在于，它最重要的功能（报导公共事务）自身在人们（公民，选民）为充分获得知情权所需要的层次上并不会产生足够的需求来支持报纸的营运。报纸从来就没有做到过这一点。长久以来，硬新闻总是受到其他更受欢迎的报纸版面的补贴，比如漫画、体育、房地产、咨询栏目和优惠券等等。随着报纸从印刷版转移至互联网，这种补贴正在枯竭，除非发现一些其他形式的补贴，新闻报道将继续衰减。

    但这几乎跟受众的年龄分布没有任何关系。首先，报纸必须代表整个公民群体——甚至包括那些不读报的人。然而，从纯商业的角度来看，在不逢迎他人的前提下，报纸需要抵达尽可能多的人群（迎合人是市场营销人员、而不是记者的工作）。有一件事数年前（早在报纸陷入死亡螺旋之前）就已变得非常明朗，那就是，所有年龄段的人正在远离报纸，转而选择广播、电视和互联网等渠道了解自己关心的世事。

    为了让这些人回心转意，报纸竭尽所能，几乎采取了一切可以采取的行动。甚至完全没有希望出现这一幕之后，它们也没有放弃尝试。报纸开始迎合，首先是迎合“公众”，然后是迎合“年轻人”，在营销部门的激励下，它们几乎尝试了各种各样可怕的愚蠢行为。在我们中间，真正具有好奇心和公民意识的过去是、现在依然是那些所剩不多、或许依然对报纸感兴趣的人。但许多报纸（《华盛顿邮报》肯定是其中一员）大量粗制滥造成堆成堆的流行文化报道，以及沉闷乏味，人为“平衡”的新闻报道，从而使这群人也渐渐失去了阅读报纸的兴致。此外，报纸也一直在削减新闻报道团队，进而使它的产品对于各个层面的读者都越来越缺乏吸引力。同样，所有这一切都发生在报纸发行量和收入开始以惊人的速度骤降（因为人们纷纷涌向互联网）之前。

    顺便说一句，真正具有好奇心和公民意识的往往是一些年龄较大的人，但不一定是老年人。这群人往往具有可观的可支配收入。但他们却也正是报纸在狂热寻求重获大众和年轻人注意力的过程中决定舍弃的人。

    "All businesses need to be young forever," Jeff Bezos told Washington Post staffers on Wednesday. "If your customer base ages with you, you're Woolworth's."

    A pithy statement -- glib, even. Not entirely inaccurate, but also not quite accurate, and not anything the Post (WPO) should ever use as a guiding principle. News organizations have repeatedly shown that when they try to chase "the youth demo," they fail miserably. Meanwhile, the Post would actually do well to emulate Woolworth's many decades of success and innovation, while also, of course, avoiding that retailer's eventual fate.

    Post employees lauded Bezos, the founder of Amazon (AMZN) and the Post's incoming owner, for his remarks on Wednesday, vague and platitudinous as they might have been. Any show of genuine optimism from a newspaper owner at this point is bound to be well-received by newspaper employees. And Bezos seems to be genuinely optimistic, if short on specifics. For now, it was enough for him to say that he believes the newspaper business can be saved, and though he didn't say anything about further investments in the Post, he at least indicated that he's not planning any further cuts.

    Nobody, including Bezos, knows yet what will work. The underlying problem for the newspaper business is that its most vital function -- reporting on public affairs -- doesn't by itself generate enough demand to support it at the levels that are needed for the people (citizens, voters) to be adequately informed. It never did -- straight news has always been subsidized by the other, more-popular parts of the newspaper -- comics, sports, real estate, advice columns, coupons, etc. That subsidy is drying up as newspapers shift from print to the Internet, and unless some other form of subsidy is found, news reporting will continue to diminish.

    This has little to do with age demographics, though. First of all, newspapers must work on behalf of the citizenry as a whole -- even including the people who don't read newspapers. From a pure business perspective, though, they need to reach as many people as they can without pandering (pandering being the job of marketers, not journalists). It became clear years ago -- well before newspapers found themselves in a death spiral -- that people of all ages were increasingly turning away from newspapers, favoring radio, TV, and the Internet to keep them as informed about the world as they cared to be.

    Newspapers did everything they could to win those people back, even after it became clear that it wouldn't ever happen. They pandered -- first to the "general public" and then to "the youth demo," with all kinds of terrible, marketing-department-inspired drivel. The truly curious and civic-minded among us were, and remain, the only people left who might still be interested in newspapers, but many newspapers -- the Washington Post definitely among them -- turned them off by cranking out piles of pop-culture coverage and dull, artificially "balanced" news reports. All the while, newspapers were also cutting back on news staff and making their product less and less appealing on every level. Again, this all started before circulation and revenue started plummeting at startling speeds as people piled on to the Internet.

    The truly curious and civic-minded, by the way, tend to be older people. Not necessarily old -- older. And they tend to have disposable income. But those were just the people newspapers decided to forsake in their fevered attempts to regain the attention of the general public and the young.