Where’s the data?

Apart from the lack of young people at newspaper industry conferences, critic Alan Mutter points out in this On the Media interview that something else is lacking from the discussions on how to "save" the newspaper industry.

Any other business that’s going through any level of change or ferment would be doing an enormous amount of empirical, bottoms-up consumer research, to try and understand what do consumers want, how do they want it, when do they want it, where do they want it, what color should it be. None of this is happening. It’s just a number of people sitting around, holding conferences, agonizing over the problem - and, by the way, it’s a big problem, and we ought to be agonizing over it - and not doing the homework necessary to try to develop new solutions that will support journalism going forward into the future.

Most of the big wigs who come together at industry conferences lament the problem and reminisce about the good old days of double-digit profit margins. Absent is quantifiable information about the customers, Mutter says.

Now, I haven't been to these conferences, but I have noticed in my own organization that there's a distinct lack of customer information (at least that I have access to). How are we supposed to make decisions if we aren't doing as much as we can to learn about the people we are selling to?

Related posts:

1. Journalism’s salvation is hiding in a mountain of data
2. Journalists should learn to love Web traffic data
3. ‘Digital Dark Age’ May Doom Some Data