Larry Kramer is not only USA Today’s president and publisher, he’s also the founder of MarketWatch. Recently he spoke about digital publishing and “adopting a digital metabolism,” as DigiDay put it.
At the Digiday Publishing Summit, Kramer defended print, saying “Print is far better for discovery. The better digital gets at what you want the less able you are to discover something you never thought of. If you’re turning the papers of a paper or magazine or TV, you’re likely to see something you didn’t ask for, and it’s a big palette.” The element of surprise, nice catch. You might compare that to the equivalent of page views on a website. If you’re not surprising them with your related articles, the page count won’t keep turning.
What I found particularly interesting was his stance of online clickbaiting (the practice of bait and switch between a headline and the story that fails to live up to the headline). “[Viral publishers] spend more time on headlines than we do. On the other hand, they overreach on the headline. You go there and you realize the story is not as sexy as the headline would make you think. If you do that enough, it sets you back. You can’t build a credible brand short term,” said Kramer.
Kramer certainly has a lot of valid points.
Read the rest of the article on Digiday.
[text_ad]
