A New Trend in US Newspapers – Let the Readers Choose the Stories They Want to Read. Whoa! (And To Get The True Meaning Of that Word Read Further About A Guy In Seattle And A Horse…)

Philip M. Stone January 25, 2006

Newspapers are trying everything they can think of to reinvent themselves, to use the Internet to their best advantage – anything to get readers back to print. So a Wisconsin State Journal editor’s note telling readers that from now on from 1100 – 1600 daily they can choose from among five stories listed on the web which one should be printed on the next day’s front page, it is yet another example of getting readers involved.

But thank goodness the newspaper is making the readers choose from a list. And hopefully it won’t offer a sixth write-in option: Other.

For if readers are left to their own design on what they would like to read on the front page it would be enough, as a Lerner & Lowe song from My Fair Lady said long ago “to make a sailor blush."

And one need look no further than the austere Seattle Times to discover the type of stories people might vote for.  The newspaper went through its hit statistics for 2005 to see which stories on its web site got the largest number of impressions and it wasn’t even a contest – one story won by such a large margin that the incident may be, according to Danny Westneat, one of the newspaper’s columnists, the most read about in the newspaper’s 109-year history.

And the winner was: A local man died from a perforated colon while having sex with a horse! Whoa!

In fact of the top 20 stories, five were about the same incident, according to Westneat.

And the real truth is the result of checking those hit statistics really should not have come as any real surprise. Sex sells. It’s as simple as that. Forget government corruption – boring – as tabloid editors the world over will attest, a good sex story is worth its weight in gold.

A few years ago this writer recalls talking to the media chief for Reuters in North America shortly after it made available to the public its news pictures service on the Internet via Yahoo. He was asked which subjects seem to be of the most interest to the US public, judged by the clicks, because maybe we should ask our editorial colleagues to further emphasize what the public wanted to see. The answer quickly came back that, in order of priority, the preferences were were  “sex, sex, and sex!” (The writer points out that basically meant those pictures of super models, or Hollywood starlets and the like in their most revealing dresses;  incidentally, that planned conversation with editorial was canceled!)

But even FTM can testify that sex does sell. Buried somewhere on this web site among its 400 plus stories is a picture of the Janet Jackson wardrobe malfunction that took place in the 2004 Super Bowl half-time show (no, we will not list the url for our lurid readers, although we will point out this site does have a search function!) (ed. note: Too lazy to search? Eyes Right!)

The picture illustrated a very serious story about how the FCC and the US Congress were reacting to alleged indecency on US television, prompted by the Jackson incident, and how the TV networks seemed to be shivering at the huge fines the FCC had started to impose and the increased fines that Congress was then debating. It was the right illustration for the story.

But ever since, when we look at the search terms most used on Google and Yahoo by people accessing our site it is strings like “Janet Jackson," “Janet’s breast” or similar (it is an education in itself to see how many synonyms there are for breast). Only when we instituted registration did those search words begin to fall off, but they are still significant to this day.

Now it may well be that the horse story hits went up more than they otherwise might because the Matt Drudge web site, among others, hyperlinked to it,  (and why would he have done that – because he knew, too, people crave those types of stories), but be that as it may the masses flocked to that story.

The decision in Wisconsin to let readers decide via their Internet choices what they see in print is not new. For the past five years Las Ultimas Noticias (The Latest News) printed in Santiago has been guided on what should appear in the newspaper by the number of clicks that stories get on the web site. The result is that the free tabloid, owned by El Mercurio, has increased circulation, is more sensational than ever and ever more lightweight. Cover a major diplomatic meeting and it is more likely to write about the menu served at dinner than the political discussions.

Which all goes to show there is a good reason why newspapers have editors, and why they should be making the editorial decisions, based on how they read their own community – all of their community rather than just those who might flock to the Internet.

But for all that, if there is any doubt at all that sex sells, sex.com has just sold for a price said to fall between $12 -$14 million.

With that in mind the FTM partners are staying awake nights trying to figure out any sexual connotation for our initials. (ed. note: Speak for yourself. (:>›) If we could, then we, too, could become overnight millionaires.

ftm Follow Up & Comments