How to microblog in high heels

The cool stylish undergrad with a neat Berliner-style Guardian tucked under his arm, the stuffy old white-haired Toff who lavishes in spreading out his ginormous Telegraph and taking up almost two square metres of air-space, the laddish lager lout who pours over page three of the Sun… are all examples of some of the stereotypes which are branded on the readers which a newspaper might represent.

“You don’t read the Daily Mail do you?” I remember hearing a friend quiz her poor adjacent guest at a dinner party. When he nervously replied, “Yes”, I saw how her eyes began to narrow as she mentally squashed him into the pre-formed cardboard box shaped by her idea of a Daily Mail reader –  a prejudiced Little Englander suspicious of foreigners and against government meddling.

Stereotypes of newspaper readers have perhaps changed over time, but are arguably still prominent and ask any newspaper consumer and they might be able to paint a picture of the kind of person who reads their paper based on its political views, types of regular features, and general stigma. Here are some dated, but exemplary, prejudices.

The stereotype of a Guardian reader is a person with leftist or liberal politics rooted in the 1960s, working in the public sector, regularly eating lentils and muesli, living in north London wearing sandals and believing in alternative medicine and natural medicine as evidenced by Labour MP Kevin Hughes.

A rhetorical question voiced in the House of Commons on 19 November 2001, taken from Wikipedia.

I know exactly who reads the papers: The Daily Mirror is read by people who think they run the country. The Guardian is read by people who think they ought to run the country; The Times is read by people who actually do run the country; The Daily Mail is read by the wives of the people who runt he country; The Financial Times is read by people who own the country; The Morning Star is read by people who think the country ought to be run by another country; and The Daily Telegraph is read by people who think it is.

Jim Hacker in Episode four, Series two of Yes, Prime Minister.

Both of these examples of reader stereotypes are today rather different, and more importantly rather untrue.

The fact is when RSS landed on our doorstep there was no longer a need to subscribe to any one paper –  we could pick and mix which elements from each paper we want to have rolled up neatly in our googlemail in-boxes in the morning, creating a colourful assortment of sweeties from political news from The Times, features from G2,to Telegraph Sport, and so on.

The problem newspapers face as a consequence is the loyalty of readers and subscribers is difficult to retain. Newspapers used to have a core readership, hence the stereotypes. The move to digital meant that regular readers could choose which sections, and even which articles, to read from a variety of newspapers. Whilst the advantage is clearly that newspapers can begin to draw in readership from rival news companies, gaining their attention even at article level, it also puts forth the problem of how to keep readers loyal.

What is a Telegraph reader in this fragmented world?

Asks Shane Richmond, Communities Editor for The Daily Telegraph. He explained how when the Telegraph first went online in 1994, it gained a lot of Guardian readers because guardian.co.uk did not appear until 1999. One way in which the paper has captured a community of loyal online readers and bloggers is through My Telegraph: an area for readers to blog on issues, events and stories they find interesting. The Telegraph were quick thinking in capturing their paper’s readers by advertising in the main newspaper for the online blog page. Readers then convened in a online community to discuss issues which, unsurprisingly, they had in common being of a similar demographic. Richmond said bloggers enjoy having the Telegraph masterhead, and sharing in a company they trust and a brand they ‘buy into’, while also not having to worry about how to use platforms they may not understand like Blogger and WordPress. They go to My Telegraph to join in a conversation, probably one they would already have over a coffee, but can now have with more people who share a similar stance on stories which cover a common ground.

The Guardian has its globally popular Comment is Free and BBC has its own moderated page for users, Have Your Say, which are also ways of gaining a regular online readership, but the future newspaper reader will ultimately not be boxed into the confines of the stereotype associated with their chosen brand. As I debated before, news consumers are attracted more by ‘buying into’ the particular personal brand of a blogger or certain journalist, rather than the newspaper as a whole. Richmond even suggested that one single article may be aggregated from parts of news articles from a variety of news sources; for example, an intro from the Times, quotes from a reporter at the Independent etc. Mention this to a journalist today and they might gaffaw in hysterical horror –  but if we’d told them fifty years ago their papers would be in decline due to a weird phenomenon called the Internet, they might have also responded in such a way. The stereotypes of newspaper readers may continue for some time yet, but in the future, with pick ‘n’ mix news becoming more and more the norm, perhaps we will see the Tory Toff clicking away online, and say “Oh, he used to be a Telegraph reader, now he is just a news consumer.”