Merc News staffers to take walkabouts

San Jose is 'rethinking" the Mercury News and its approach to delivering the goods.

http://www.portfolio.com/views/blogs/daily-brief/2007/08/07/rethinking-the-mercury-news


This jumps out:

"At the core of the Mercury News campaign is a deceptively simple idea: Give the readers what they want.

To achieve this, the paper is preparing to conduct an extensive survey of its readership, to be undertaken by teams of staff members from all departments at the Mercury News, who will venture into the community to observe and catalog readers' news consumption habits."

How do you catalog a reader's news consumption habit? Watch people at lunch? Knock on doors? Interrupt them while they're reading to ask, "Hey, wha'cha reading?"

 

It's LEan Dean, remember?
The next step to community journalism and fewer internal bodies...

 

Good god, what a terrible fucking idea.
The widget salesmen are in charge.

 

"I read the Classifieds. That's about it."

The most common answer to a survey I helped do 10 years ago. Great for the ego.

 

I don't see how this is an improvement over the professionals we've used for market surveys over the past, oh, 50 years, not that it's done us much good. It seems the Merc staffers will be gathering lots of anecdotal information rather than scientific measurement, unless I am misunderstanding this.

Also, I hope these staffers will be fully innoculated before venturing outside the office to meet their readers for the very first time and that they will be given GPS so they don't get lost out there. It's hard to build an immunity to reader cooties when you live outside the circulation area because you can't afford to live in the circulation area, and thus spend no time within the circulation area other than at your desk. Geez, could that be part of our problem?

 

Now walkabout now walkabout now walkabout now walkabout.

 

Someone may want to investigate whether Lean Dean has a mole in the Gannett operation somewhere. This sounds like the work of those geniuses.