Audience determines your path

Consider which audience you want to work for rather than which company.

That’s the advice of Dennis Joyce, an editor with The Tampa Tribune and TBO.com‘s data center. The audience for your work will determine much of what you get to do on the job, so you should consider that when thinking about your career.

That also means that every journalist should be an audience expert to succeed. Web analytics and market data should not be concentrated in just a few hands. It’s important that everyone in the newsroom know who their audience is. So if no one seems to be giving you that information, seek it out. And if you have that information, be sure to share it — along with the skills to interpret it.

Rob Curley, the cult hero of news Web sites everywhere (or something close), has a list of 5 P’s that can help a site grow an audience. They are

Passions: People look to the Web to find out every little thing about what they care about most. Find a topic people are passionate about, and go with it.

Practical: News you can use. Give people the tools they need to live their lives and the tools that make it easier and better.

Playful: The Web is fun. People don’t watch lol cats videos for hours because it helps them do their jobs. It’s fun, and people look for that.

Personal Communication: The Web connects people through various communities on Facebook, on Twitter, through e-mail and chat, with forums and bulletin boards, and plenty more.

Porn: But you knew that already.

He follows up his description of the 5 P’s on his blog with a bit more about what newspaper can do to make the most of their Web sites:

My guess is that newspapers might be able to compete much better in all of the chaos that we find ourselves in if we would just look at what readers used to like about our print editions and embrace those sorts of equivalents with new media.

It isn’t just the journalism that made the printed newspaper work. It’s the comics and crosswords and movie listings and the product reviews and the sports stories and Dear Abby. And especially the ads.

Makes sense to me.