The reader as user

As news editor at TheLadders, where content was but a small portion of the product, I slipped into the habit of referring to readers as… USERS.

Editorial purists will surely gasp. The word user makes it seem too much like we’re producing a commodity product that must meet a customer demand and make a profit. We practice a calling, not a business, Right? Imagine if artists were asked to think of their audience as users. They’re doing so now. And likely gasping.

The New York TImes’s video gaming critic Seth Schiesel wrote yesterday about Bjork’s latest album Biophilia, which was released as an iPad app in which “the user (no longer merely the listener) takes control of a sound-creation tool, tapping pools of light to combine and mix tones of Gregorian complexity.”

Schiesel writes about the evolution it is for artists to “ fans the ability to mess around readily with a treasured creation” and the creative possibilities that might unfold. But there’s a simpler lesson for journalists: If artists, the purest of purists, can see their audience as users, so can you.

And it makes a difference in how we report and deliver the news.

I often put myself in the shoes of the reader and ask reporters and editors to do the same:

• “Would you read that story?”
• “Would you share that story?”
• “Would you be able to find the vital information on that page?”
• “Is this an information source you could apply in your work?”
• “Would you come back to this news site?”

By considering the reader a user, we might begin to take the steps to deliver not just the best content, but the content most in demand by the audience, in the most useful and accessible format.

The reader is user. I think journalists can accept that.

Wait ‘til they hear their producing a product. :-X