When William Randolph Hearst died in 1951, television was only just beginning to firm its grip on American culture and newspapers still set the agenda. The Internet hadn’t even been imagined. Yet, I believe, it’s safe to say that if Hearst the man could weigh in on Hearst the company’s latest acquisition — not a newspaper, a magazine or even a website, but a company specializing in buying search keywords and performing social media — he’d like it.
Hearst, after all, was the guy who uttered this immortal line: “Putting out a newspaper without promotion is like winking at a girl in the dark — well-intentioned, but ineffective.”
It’s a sentiment that might be well-over a half-century old but one many publishers still struggle to understand. Hearst knew it wasn’t enough to just produce news stories, how ever well-reported or beautifully-written, and hope that readers would come. Even in the primitive tech environment of Hearst’s time, news media suffered from fragmentation, with multiple broadsheets and tabloids competing for reader’s interest in any given city or town.
Hearst knew that to succeed in that cluttered environment a publisher had to be a bit P.T. Barnum. And, as a result, the Hearst name will forever be associated with yellow journalism techniques that led to a war and mainstream acceptance of all kinds of crazy psuedoscience.
The point here is not that audience development should come at the expense of truth, but that you can’t ignore the environment in which your content lives. If you do, it won’t live for long. That’s as true now as it was then. The difference today is rather than be part Barnum, it’s best to be part Ballmer.
