News-Record.com

So last week, Jon Stewart, the host of Comedy Central's "The Daily Show," appeared as a guest on CNN's political-argument show, "Crossfire." You really have to see the video to get the full gist; the transcript just doesn't convey things like the look on co-host Tucker Carlson's face as Stewart, in the wonderful words of blogger Nancy Nall, "cuts out Tucker Carlson's heart, shows it to him, then eats it slowly." (That's a metaphor, for the easily alarmed.)

Dave Winer, who has forgotten more about blogging than most people will ever know, sees Stewart's take as, at least in part, the complaint of a dissatisfied customer and asks:

Wasn't he a customer saying he wasn't satisfied with the service?

Should journalists listen to their customers? (I don't mean advertisers, I mean the people who read, listen to, or watch their reports.)

Should they try to give them what they want?

If not, why not?

Would journalism get better?

Some journalists say they give the customers what they want, but I wonder about that.

If they were, wouldn't they have to listen to customers?

I think Stewart was saying he was dissatisfied with the program hosts' product, but I also think he would argue that "customer" inappropriately casts the relationship between him and "Crossfire" in commercial terms. Rightly or wrongly, he believes "Crossfire" and its network ought to be doing more to provide the citizens of a free republic with the information they need to govern themselves and that it is instead engaging in political theater for purely entertainment purposes.

Nonetheless, the question is valid: Should journalists listen to their customers? And the answer is: of course. And the N&R often does that very well, I think. For example, a few years ago our delivery goal for weekday morning papers was 6 a.m. for the last paper. But reader research suggested that so many people are commuting such long distances or otherwise starting their days earlier that we needed to move that deadline up at least 30 minutes, to 5:30 a.m. And so we did.

But saying that we should listen to customers is not synonymous with giving customers everything they want.

For one thing, if we gave customers everything they wanted, we'd go broke. And having been in business for 114 years or so, we've gotten kind of accustomed to being in business and would like to remain so.

For another, because we can't give customers everything we want, we have to prioritize. And for a newspaper's news department, local news and public-service journalism need to be at the top of the priority list, in my humble opinion, for both practical and philosophical reasons.

The practical reason: We can do local news and public-service journalism better than any other mass medium. In classical economic terms, we have a competitive advantage in these areas.

The philosophical reason: We have a constitutional duty to provide that service, and providing it well and in quantity is the kharmic payback we owe for industrywide profit margins a couple of multiples of the national industrial average. (Again, this is me talking, not the N&R.)

Those two priorities must remain priorities, I think, even when customers tell us they want other things. That doesn't mean we won't run national or world stories on the front page from time to time, and it doesn't mean we're going to kill our sports and features sections to devote those resources to news. But it means that in a less-than-stellar economic climate in which hard decisions are forced upon us, that's where the bulk of our resources must continue to go.

Now, within that framework, there is wide latitude for a newspaper to take the wishes of its readers into account. And we use reader research and other tools to try to do that -- to focus on subjects readers say they want more coverage of. We also try to respond to tips we get. Historically, the N&R's ambitions always have exceeded its resources, and it gets a little frustrating some days when we have six great story ideas to pursue and only three available reporters, but we do the best we can with what we have. More importantly, we use that sense of frustration to help us keep from getting complacent.

Blogs, among other virtues, are one more way we can listen to customers -- to get story tips, feedback on stories, and information on what's going on in the community and what the community considers important.

And as leader of the paper's enterprise/investigative team, I'm always particularly interested in tips on good stories. We might or might not be able to pursue the story, but I'm definitely willing to listen.

UPDATE: Journalist-turned-rhetorician Andrew Cline thinks "The Daily Show" serves its customers well and that "Crossfire" does not. To put it mildly.