By KRISTINA SHERRY
news@ColumbiaMissourian.com

COLUMBIA — I have a pet peeve:
It’s when a stand-up comedian tells a lame joke and then blames the audience for not laughing.
“Come on! What’s wrong with you guys? That was funny!” — says annoying comedian with desperately outstretched arms.

Um, no it wasn’t. It’s an audience’s prerogative not to laugh when a joke isn’t funny; it’s the comedian who doesn’t get it.

Sometimes the news media, unfortunately, work in the same way.

Like the obliviously combative comedian, we spend so much time inside our own heads — strategizing our reporting, twiddling with sentences, dabbling among journalists and other media insiders and contemplating what looks good to us — that it’s easy to undervalue the perspectives of the people we’re serving.

We forget that our readers (and prospective readers) might see things differently from outside the confines of a newsroom. Inside the newsroom we use buzzwords like “immediacy” and “innovation.” We place great emphasis on the “anecdotal lede,” putting a “local spin” on news stories and using newfangled multimedia techniques to tell them.

But do news audiences care about (or even notice) these things?

We pat ourselves on the back for using “alternate story forms” and writing clever “kickers” — all without knowing if our criteria for success mesh with our readers’.

The media can get easily caught up in the inside politics of the profession. Like a clique of teenage girls exchanging banal gossip in the hallway, we become self-obsessed with status symbols: Who scooped whom? Who has the biggest audience? Who got the ”exclusive” interview?

These worries and discussions are inherently exclusive of our audiences.

As a graduate student in print reporting, I was less than thrilled when we were introduced to the “Watching the Watchdogs” project, in which Mid-Missourians were invited to share their thoughts on the media at three open forums at the Columbia Public Library. I saw it as yet another counterproductive, time-wasting obstacle to what I’d really hoped to do this summer: become a more competent news reporter and writer.

But part of journalistic competency, I now realize, means keeping in touch with our readers.
Once the first “Watchdog” discussion kicked off, I saw the value in hearing from real people whose perspectives and feedback could only help me to become a better journalist.

We heard from self-titled “news junkies” who read several papers daily because they don’t believe in “objectivity.” (Objectivity is good, one participant said, “but it denies that there are different points of view.”)

We heard from newsreaders amazed by the “immediacy” of Internet news, and some who weren’t as impressed. Some lamented immediacy’s lack of context, while others suggested there might be too much digital news. “A lot of things get on my computer screen that I never asked for,” said one man referring to NYTimes.com.

And others shared things they don’t care about. These included: Heather Locklear’s depression; “Mickey Mouse” coverage of political candidates that ignores the issues; celebrities with “no brains,” and news articles that rely too heavily on press releases and PR language.

In short, our participants brought wonderfully diverse and legitimate perspectives to the discussion, some of which touched upon the subject of the Columbia Missourian. This, to me, indicated two things: 1. We have readers (!!!) and 2. We have readers, and there are identifiable ways we could be serving them better. These revelations were a source of encouragement and motivation to produce journalism that has a clearer picture of its audience in mind.

This isn’t to say that media outlets are failing their audiences across the board. Nor does listening more closely to audiences mean kowtowing to their every demand and abandoning our journalistic principles in the process.

It simply means shrinking our professional egos and placing greater value in the needs, wants and interests of our readers.

Otherwise, we run the risk of losing them.

And that wouldn’t be funny.